Driving From Phoenix, Arizona to Santa Monica, California

Back In California!

      We have officially arrived in California. We took I-10 from Phoenix, Arizona all all the way to Santa Monica, California.  First, we made it in five hours to L.A and then we drove west to Santa Monica.  When we arrived in Santa Monica, we saw that the state park we were planning to go to was closed so we had to find another place to car camp.

 

       Santa Monica is a beach community, consisting of 90,377 people, and it is the place where the original Route 66 ends. When we visited Santa Monica, we went to Starbucks in the morning, (My mom's favorite place to get online.)

     We then went to Santa Monica State Beach after parking and paying for a meter, which goes up to five hours, and then we went to the beach, which is a beautiful beach with warm showers. We swam there for a approximately two hours, and then we went to the Santa Monica pier - where there are rides, food stands, and coin tosses. My sister and I went on the roller coaster there, and then we saw our photo of us.  I was laughing in the photo, and my sister was freaking out. She said that they caught her "private moments," a phrase she totally made up one day.

     We also played a game where you have to squeeze the trigger of a gun to shoot water into the hole of a rising object with a hole in it (Hello Kitty sat on top of this thing), and I lost the first time, but won the second time. I won a big dark snake, who I named Sharkey. We then realized that the time on the meter was going to expire, so we bought something at the souvenir shop there, got a picture of me and my sisters underneath the Route 66 sign, and walked back to the van, which I call "Mecur", because it is missing the y in Mercury insignia on the back of the vehicle.

Driving West to East in the USA in Four days

     As we traveled on I-80 through 11 states, the weather in each state was different. The first day, we drove from Northern California to Salt Lake City, Utah.  We went through Reno-there are a lot of casinos there. Next, we drove through Salt Lake City-very hot and in the high 80's.
       



There's not a lot to see in SLC, Utah.

    
     The next day, we drove through Wyoming, where we were snowed into the Rocky Mountains.  We were going about 40-45 miles an hour on snow, and the people passing us were going 60 miles an hour on the frozen left lane. We pulled over at a truck stop near the border of Nebraska and just stayed there. There were about 20-30 truckers there as well.  It got down to 8 degrees that night. My mom woke me up around midnight to tell me this, and we tried to get the heater working, and we eventually did, after I turned the radio on a a couple of times, since I was half-awake. In the morning, the roads were cleared.

Building a snowman in Wyoming.

My sisters and I were glad to reach Nebraska because it was warmer than Wyoming - but watch out for snakes!

     On the third day, we woke up and drove for five hours.  We reached Omaha, Nebraska, which is on the border of Iowa and Nebraska.  We stopped there for the night, before heading off to Des Moines.  Des Moines is famous for the girl who stopped the midnight express when the bridge in her town went out. She crawled across the broken bridge and ran all the way to the Des Moines station and told them to stop the express.  She then told them where the train crew was that went down with the bridge.  The train crew was rescued, and she received an award. When she got home, she fell in a deep sleep. She was exhausted.

Nebraska looks like this for 8 hours.



Missouri weather was nice - in the 70's - but the people aren't friendly there.

 

We stopped at the site of the original Pony Express Station for a break while we were in St. Joseph, Missouri.

     The fourth day, we arrived in Springfield, Illinois.  We could have kept going to our final destination - New Market, Virginia.  But we spend a day visiting the home of Abraham Lincoln at the National Park Service.  It was well done and a great visit to the former town of President Lincoln.  The homes and streets from that time are all there - just like they were when he was alive!

 

My sister is almost as almost as tall as I am - and I am tall!

My little sister is cute.

Inside the homes in President Lincoln's old town are artifacts from the period.

Here we are in front of President Lincoln's Springfield home - before he left to be President.

We really loved the room we stayed in that night.  My mother was able to get this room for only $60!

 

My visit to The Virginia Museum of Transportation

     I recently went to the Virginia Museum of Transportation, located in Roanoke, where I had a tour from a fellow who actually worked for the railroad for seven years before working at the museum. It was a great tour of the trains and of the transportation of yesterday and today.

     He showed me one coal-burning class J locomotive, the only one left of its kind. The first locomotive is Norfolk & Western class J 611, and she entered service around 1950. It served as a passenger train, and could run up to 110-140 miles per hour. She could pull a 15 car train at 115 MPH. She can hold 35 tons of coal in her tender, and 20,000 gallons of water. She was retired in 1959 until she was returned to excursion service in 1982. She ran as a excursion train until 1994, when she entered the Virginia Museum of Transportation, where she had been before. She ran between Cincinnati, OH and Norfolk, VA.  She also ran between Monroe, NC and Bristol, TN. She is restored and the museum is doing research to try to get her to run again. For more information about 611,      the website is: http://www.fireup611.org/main/index.php.

     There is Plexi-glass in 611,  because regular people have been stealing levers and gauges, and then they put it up on E bay as a "collectors item". He then showed me Class A locomotive 1218. It is restored, but there are missing parts scattered all over the tender. It is the only locomotive of its kind to escape the scrap yard.   For more info on these trains: http://vmt.org/collections/rail.htm

     After I saw 611, I was able to go inside a 1963 GMC bus, and I was able to sit in the driver's seat. The bus can run and it is in good condition. The doors, however, have to opened by hand because the bus has not been used in a while, so the things that open the doors have broken. The truck directly behind it is a 1965 Bull Dog Mack truck, which is fully restored and it can run. It even has a little bull dog on it.  I then saw two operating trains moving cars for a steam train excursion next week. The steam train is coming up from North Carolina, and will do a excursion train. I was actually allowed to walk up to the diesel locomotives and see the interior of them. The yard switcher does not have a bathroom, but is similar to the other diesel locomotive.

     A little later on in my tour, in a train cab, My tour guide told me and two other guys stories about when he worked for the railroad. He told a story about a jogger that got run over by the train. The jogger was wearing headphones and jogging across the trestle.  The train crew noticed the jogger, and they were blowing the horn and the conductor was shouting. The jogger got to the track directly across the trestle, and then he did a thing that cost him his life. He turned around and froze. The dirt was only 2 feet away. The train hit him at 55 MPH, with brakes on and everything. The jogger was tossed up and thrown into the coupling and he was cut up.  They told my tour guide this, but they did not tell him that there was a hand wedged between the hand rails. My tour guide noticed the hand during an inspection of the train, and he took off. Someone had to go and get him, and they even bought him a Dr. Pepper to calm him down.   

     He told a couple more stories, and then his friend went by in a diesel locomotive hauling 76 cars to Chicago, where he was expected at 9 AM in the morning the next day. My tour guide started yelling at him to give the locomotive more horsepower. He said to count all of the cars, and I lost track about 65.  After, I was able to see a 1930 Dodge school bus. There were no seat belts in those days, and there was no ventilation in the bus. High school kids sat on the outside, and elementary kids sat on the inside. The roads were not paved, so if your bus got stuck, you were given a shovel and you had to dig your bus out. I was impressed. After that, the tour ended. I thought that the tour guide had explained everything pretty well to me and I liked the 611 locomotive most of all, because it stands out and it is a beautiful locomotive. 

     The museum itself is a great museum if you are into transportation, and I think that the museum should continue to restore locomotives for people to see as they were back in their time. Class J #611 is going to be tested to see if it can be returned to excursion service, and I think it would be great to have a 1950's train in today's railroads.