Tucson Trip, Day 1

1. Urban Dictionary: soul clap 

   www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=soul%20clap‎

   The "soul clap" is a particular rhythm: it means clapping on the notes of a beat.

   
   

   My daughter Melissa and I drove to Tucson a few weeks ago and spent some time with our sweet Tammera and her family. You can read a little bit about Tammera  here and here. You're probably wondering what "soul clapping" has to do with this trip. We'll get to that later.
   
   Day 1:  Delayed Start
   
   We had planned to leave around 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. Melissa rode into work with Donny and I was supposed to pick her up at Idler's. She was forced to be on time. I was not. Consequently, I arrived around 8:30 a.m. Not too bad. We set about transferring Melissa's stuff to my car. That's when we discovered the first problem of the morning. I had put a bottle of carpet shampoo in my trunk. It was a special kind (with fancy enzymes) and I was taking it to Tammera. Somehow, it had tipped over and the lid popped open and almost the entire bottle had spilled in my trunk, soaking the carpet as well as the whole bottom of my suitcase. Poor Donny set about cleaning up the mess. He was awesome! He even had to get the wet/dry vac from his work. But finally, the situation was remedied. We went back to packing the car. We had to arrange things carefully because we took a lot of stuff, including two sewing machines! We were heavily loaded.
   
   

   

   
   Notice the entire bag of San Luis Sourdough bread. Tammera loves it!
   
   

   

   
   We were taking a route that would completely avoid Los Angeles (Mel and I don't do well in big city traffic) so we headed towards 46 East after Melissa finally tore herself away from Donny. We weren't even out of town yet when I said, "Where's my phone?" Melissa started looking all over the car. Somehow, in the crisis over the carpet shampoo, my phone had disappeared. Eventually, she took out her phone and called mine.
   
   Ring, ring, ring, ring.
   
   "Hello?"
   
   "Donny! What are you doing answering Mom's phone?"
   
   "Uh, ... I don't know. Uh, it was in my pocket."   ???
   
   We turned around, headed back to Idler's, picked up my phone, said goodbye to Donny again, and once more headed towards the highway. We were now about two hours behind schedule. Not that big a deal except that we were staying in a hotel that night in the Palm Springs area and we wanted to get there in time to have a nice dinner, maybe a drink, and then a soak in the hot tub. We wanted to take full advantage of our $100 room!
   
   We planned to drive to Barstow and then cut down through some area called Yucca Valley. This would avoid the whole L.A./Riverside locale and dump us in Palm Springs. I don't know if you have driven that way before but let me tell you, it's a whole lot of nothing. It was beastly hot, incredibly boring, ugly, barren, and completely unremarkable. We began to take pictures of the rest stops just so that we could "create some memories."
   
   

   

   
   And don't let that green fool you. Apparently, they water the rest stops. Just outside this picture were miles and miles of dirt and cactus.
   
   We were well prepared to entertain ourselves. We each had loaded hundreds of songs on our iPods and we also had a bountifully stocked "food sack." This consisted of several bags of chips, tons of candy, almonds, cookies, gum, and of course, water, because, you know, we wanted to be healthy. Occasionally, we would get carried away and sing along boisterously to the iPod and record ourselves at the same time. Then we would post the videos on Facebook because we thought we were hysterical. We discovered a weird trait that we shared. I did most of the driving that first day so Melissa was in charge of music. She liked to listen to just the first part of a song and then she tired of it and moved on to the next song. She said it drove Donny crazy when she did that. Funny thing is, I often do that too. I just didn't know that she did. So, we quite happily drove across the desert listening to an average of two songs a minute. Could that be an inherited gene? This brings us to "soul clapping." Melissa taught me how to soul clap during one song and I proceeded to apply it to almost every song after that. According to her, you only can soul clap to certain songs but I disagree. I thought it worked quite well for almost every song.
   
   We made it to hot, humid Barstow and then headed south through Yucca Valley. The scenery continued to deteriorate. There were actually people that lived in this wasteland. They had street names (and I use the term "street" loosely) like "Rose Eden Drive" and "Paradise Ave.", as if giving their little dirt path a pretty name would somehow improve their surroundings. I've always appreciated Paso Robles but this drive took that appreciation to a new level. You can drive for miles without any hands (unless you need an alignment) because the road is so straight! Unfortunately, there is apparently a lot of flash flooding in Yucca Valley during the monsoon season. We ended up being stopped for over an hour, in the sweltering heat, while the road was being cleared. The policeman said that cars had been washed away. It was hard to imagine since we were baking under the unrelenting sun.
   
   

   

   
   We finally got underway again and made it to our hotel which was somewhere near Palm Springs.
   
   

   

   
   
   We had wanted to eat dinner. The hotel had no restaurant or bar. That may have been an oversight on my part. There was road construction all around the hotel so we walked, looking for somewhere to eat. That was about the time that Melissa had the first of her many meltdowns. It was so hot and humid, we were so tired, it was just a bit much. We had arrived much later than anticipated and we were just done! We walked across the street and found nothing and eventually walked down a couple of blocks where we stumbled across a grocery store and bought sandwiches, beer, and a Mike's Hard Lemonade.
   
   

   

   
   The sun was setting by the time we were headed back to the hotel and when Melissa stubbed her toe on a piece of cement, she started to cry! I tried to console her, all the while laughing at her. In spite of the hardships, we were blessed by God's beauty.
   
   

   

   
   
   We hadn't planned on the heat and humidity so there was no way we were venturing down to the hot tub. Plus, this was a "family friendly" hotel and it was Labor Day weekend so there were screaming kids in the pool, which our room overlooked, until almost midnight. We were cheered up, though, once we cooled off in our air conditioned room and got some decent food in us. (We'd had nothing but chips and candy all day.) And so, Day 1 ended. We were a little worse for wear, and Melissa was insisting that she would never drive to Tucson again (she wanted to fly, instead), but we'd made it halfway and hadn't killed each other yet so I thought the day was a success!
   
   Stay tuned for Day 2!