Old Timer Garage

After a good night sleep, we are getting ready for the second day of our trip.
Today we are going to take a walk in some of Phoenix outlets before leaving the city for Jerome Ghost Town.

The house in which we spent the night was big and the air conditioning very appreciated considering the outside temperature in Phoenix but the cleanliness was somewhat left to be improved (and I am not usually too picky). We booked another AirBnB for the leg of our trip right before Death Valley and I hope that it will be better.

Taking pictures and recording videos in the outlets area is forbidden so I don’t have much to show about that part of the day but apart from the size of it, there is nothing out of this world to show. The girls loved this shopping time and as far as I am concerned, I am not a big shopping fan but I enjoy the water sparklers in the different alleys. It is already pretty much mid October and although it is only 10 am, the temperature is already nearing the 40 degrees Celsius. I can’t even imagine what it would be in the middle of the summer. I am told the temperature regularly reaches and goes over 50 degrees Celsius.

After having melted our credit cards, we are back in the car towards Jerome this time. I wanted to include at least one ghost town in this trip and for some reason, Jerome is the first one I found on our way when I was preparing this trip. With what I know now, I would probably advise somewhere else for a ghost town that is really authentic and although Jerome is nice enough, I was a little disappointed.

We get stuck in a few traffic jams on the outskirts of Phoenix but nothing too heavy and very quickly, we are back on the long straight roads in the middle of the desert. The scenery is a little more mountainous but still as dry as yesterday.
Towards the end of the afternoon, we find ourselves on a small road and we follow our GPS order to turn left and go up the mountain. Jerome is close now and the last few miles are done on small mountainous roads. “Small” here stay at the Americain dimension and by small I mean smaller than all the other roads we have driven on so far.
I am driving and I am enjoying the opportunity to be able to at last put the almost 300 hp of my brother’s car to good use after all those straight lines. I love driving generally speaking but mountain driving is always more interesting because at the end of the day, driving an automatic car on a straight line is pretty much like riding a kid’s motorbike: just put some gas and wait for the scenery to go by…

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After a few more minutes, we reach the town of Jerome and for a ghost town, I think that there are quite a lot of people there. We look for the entrance to the actual ghost town without much success and we quickly arrive on the other side of the town. The view is nice so we stop a few minutes to take a couple of pictures before heading back down into town to keep looking for the ghost town.
In the end, we find it on the other side of the town. In fact, there are a lot of abandoned vehicles of all types, left in a field to rust and a few wooden houses that seem to have been preserved. A few people seem to live there, I can hear the TV on in some of them when I walk past them. The night is already coming and we are the last ones to enter there. We won’t be able to enter the actual ghost town park but we still tour the outside of it and I take advantage of that to take a few pictures of the old cars. Through a window of one of the wooden houses, someone is “discreetly” following us. I think it is time to leave and as soon as we start driving away, a car follows us and close the gate to the ghost town as soon as we cross it.

 

 

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Our next stop for the night will be Winslow and this is about two hours and twenty minutes away.
When I prepared this trip, I tried and limit the driving to a maximum of two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. This had the advantage of leaving us most of the days to visit and also to take us away from the touristic areas in the evenings which ended up saving us a lot of money in hotels. There will of course be a few exceptions to this but all in all, the organisation of this trip wasn’t too bad (a bit of self congratulations can’t be all bad right? J )

Tomorrow will be our first encounter with Route 66. We are also going to visit Petrified Forest national park and of course I took a lot of classic car pictures…

To be continued… here: 7- Winslow, Route 66 and Petrified Forest

 

 

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