Heartland View

Media Credit: Jarod Clarke

Well if you ever plan to motor west… Just take my way that's the highway that's the best… -- "Route 66" by Bobby Troup

For my final spring break I decided to pull out all the stops and take a road trip west with a couple of my buddies. As soon as classes were over Friday morning, we packed our bags and hit the road in my friends Pontiac GTO for a voyage across the country which ended up covering more than 3,000 miles through six different states.

Our first stop was Amarillo, Texas where my friend's parents live. We had plans to catch a Hank Williams III concert that night, but the local honky-tonk bar didn't advertise the show's time correctly on their Web site, so we only caught the end. It was all worth it in the end, as we met Hank after the show and my friend got his cowboy hat signed. We were surprised when we had to drive back in a blizzard that night. We thought we had escaped that kind of weather when we left Missouri.

After spending a couple of days in Amarillo, we drove west on the way to Tucson, Ariz. to stay with a friend who had taken a job there after college. This was when our drive got interesting.

The drive through New Mexico was amazing. The scenery was so much different than the Midwest landscape we were all used to, and the closer we got to the Rocky Mountains the more breathtaking the sights were. We made it a point to leave Amarillo early that morning for the long drive because we wanted to see all the new scenery in the daytime.

Across the New Mexico desert the U.S. Border Patrol stopped us, which was something we had never experienced before. We were all surprised on how quickly they checked out before letting us by. It almost seemed too easy to pass.

We rolled into Tucson pretty late that night and found our friend's place, where we met up with some of our other friends from school. Our other friends had flown there and had been there for a day or two already.

We told our friends of all the amazing scenery we had viewed on the drive there. While driving around Tucson the next day with my two friends, we all realized how awesome it was to drive, and that our other friends missed out on all of the great things we saw during the drive. Flying would have been much faster, but driving was much more worth it because of what we saw. Our decision to drive had even more rewards as we left Tucson later that week and drove to Las Vegas, Nev., a place neither of us had been before.

During the drive to Vegas we saw even more amazing scenery than before, as we drove towards the Grand Canyon and up to the Hoover Dam where we ultimately got caught in construction traffic. We saw a type of tree that we had never seen before called a Joshua Tree. My friend said he had recognized the name from a U2 album title.

After our night in Vegas we decided to bypass the Hover Dam on the way back to Amarillo and go south. We eventually made it to Interstate Highway 40, which we drove on across Arizona and New Mexico. Covering some of the same area as historic U.S. Route 66, we drove into Flagstaff, Ariz. where we began to see snow on that ground and large pine trees, things we hadn't experienced during the trip. We decided that we must have been going downhill for most of the trip back to Amarillo that day, because when we got into town my friend noticed that we had gotten 30 plus miles to the gallon. This was amazing for his V8 GTO.

Although the trip took longer by driving, the breathtaking sights we encountered during the trip made it well worth it. It was an amazing journey which none of us regret. If you have the time to spare and a reliable vehicle, consider hitting the road. You don't know what you might see.

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