Just yesterday, we decided with certainty that we’d head out of Phoenix for an overnight somewhere in Arizona on Saturday morning. At the last minute, I worked out an itinerary on the map that would take us west towards the California border and then north. The little two-day jaunt would end in Flagstaff with another visit to Proper Meats + Provisions, where we recently enjoyed the greatest Patty Melt we’d ever had. So we packed up a small bag and got going.

We should have left the freeway at 355th Avenue, but there was no exit, so we took the Wintersburg Road offramp and turned right and right again before reaching 355th Avenue where we needed to turn left off of Indian School Road to head north.

After a few miles, our road curves and becomes Aguila Road. We were just going along when a horse trailer and Mustang that passed us while I was taking the previous photo were heading back the way they came. We thought this was strange and that maybe they’d forgotten something, or could this just be a coincidence of being a different horse trailer and Mustang? Obviously, something was glitching in the matrix. Then, not 2 minutes later, we learned that it was, in fact, them. They had decided that they weren’t going to attempt crossing this mess on the road. Something about the mud and debris flow didn’t smell right; it smelled downright awful. No matter, we turned around as there were other ways to get to where we were going.

Instead of getting back on the 10 freeway, Caroline noticed that Indian School Road runs along the interstate until 411th Avenue, so we’ll take it just to keep our trek off of that ugly road. Hmmm, come to think about it, I had Caroline text me a message as we were leaving Phoenix regarding my utter disdain for our freeways. It read like this, “Freeways are like the average American, fat and bloated with generic franchised, gluttonous places to indulge our worst inclinations. There is nothing to see, no character, and the billboards, like people’s outward appearance, display slogans offering a peak in the height of one’s stupidity.”

Yeah, take that, you stupid ugly freeways with inconsiderate road-raging asshole drivers; we are opting to take the byways to places the mass of turds will never know on their way in a hurry to who knows what. We are the real elitists above the antics of conformity because we don’t travel the way idiots do…

…Until we are the idiot. Transferring from the north side of Interstate 10 to the south side, we were able to pick up Indian School Road again, and well, everyone knows that Indian School Road is a big paved affair, so we were going to skip more freeway and enjoy the peace and quiet of a truly rural drive while everyone else zips along lightning speed. Little did we know that only a few miles on the pavement would end, but things looked manageable, so we soldiered on. We knew that some miles down the road, just south of I-10, Indian School intersects with Salome Road, which is exactly the road we want that will bring us to Eagle Eye Road and, subsequently, Aguila. There would have been nothing much in Aguila to see, just some old ruins of motels possibly, and then we’d turn around back towards Wenden before hitting Hope, Bouse, and Parker. From the Colorado River, our plan was to drive over the dam coming back down through California to Vidal Junction up towards Needles, near where we’d cross back into Arizona for a drive up the Oatman Highway, a.k.a. Historic Route 66. There were other plans from that point on the road, but when we reached the intersection of Indian School and Salome and needed to turn right, this mud hole put an end to our road trip. We were defeated and hungry by now, so we turned around.

We were driving back towards Phoenix. With an hour and a half before we’d reach home, Caroline broke out the Kindle to read us some more In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. We are currently in the volume titled The Guermantes Way, which at the exact spot we are means we are 46% through this 1.2 million word book. By the time we reached Bethany Home and 16th Street where we shared an overpriced burger with garlic fries, we got to 47% of the book finished. As for the burger joint, Caroline also had a beer, I had nothing to drink, and our bill with a $5 tip came to $40. Maybe we would have been better off staying in to be everywhere within ourselves inexpensively than to have gone out to get nowhere. But on the plus side, we got to spend some quality time together in the car, so all in all, we had a great little adventure.