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I didn't feel I had enough time to stop
and explore any of these monuments so I snapped a few
more pictures and headed on out SR 179 to I-17 and then
make up some time getting to Phoenix at somewhat better
than a mile a minute. Somewhere along the way, I found
something I didn't know I'd been missing. Lost
horsepower. In Colorado, when I want to pass
someone on the highway with aplomb, I drop it into 3rd.
Somewhere south of Sedona, I discovered I could do the
same thing in 4th gear, and by the time I reached Phoenix
I didn't even have to shift out of 5th to break the
spirit of the guy playing the "speed up/slow down
game" in the lane next to me. The problem is, there
is 14% less oxygen at my altitude, and that works out to
a loss of about 30 horses from sea level. I got it back
on temporary loan for the duration of my stay in AZ and
CA.
I finally rolled up to the Leonard family house at about
6:45. Funny.. no cars in the drive, no people, and Brad
and Jonathan are just getting in. Confusion.. See, here's
the problem. Back at Four Corners, I remembered that
Arizona is weird, and doesn't observe daylight savings
time, so I set my watch forward an hour. Ooops..
"Spring forward.. fall back.. " I should have
set it back an hour. No wonder Anna told me to spend some
time in Sedona. I could have easily spent another hour
there and made it to Phoenix with time to spare. Oh well.
Anyway... Brad's birthday party was fun, and I met some
of the neighbors and so on.
End of day 2.
The next morning we got on the road at 8 or so. Andrew
rode with me for a 50 miles or so to the first rest stop.
He played Diablo (a computer game) on the laptop while I
admired the scenery of a flat featureless desert. Then we
traded off and Anna drove the GTI. On the entrance ramp,
these were my instructions,
"Ok, now we're in second gear. Just put your foot to
the floor and take it to the redline."
She did.. then missed the 2nd to 3rd shift, ended up in
5th, but that's fine, because 2nd gear runs out of steam
at 70 mph so we were already going the legal limit.
Whee.. A couple miles down the road, she got bored
following Brad and the kids in the mini-van so she
stepped on the gas and off we went. Another mile down the
road she looks down at the speedometer for the first time
and says.
"Ninety!? This is ninety and this is nothing.. This
is nothing."
A few miles later, we cruised by a cop at 75 or 80 mph
while I explained what all the noisy racket coming from
the radar detector was about. :-) Luckily, the GTI looks
like a slow econo-box to a cop.
We stopped for lunch in Blythe at the CA border. Anna
swapped out for Jonathan, who had already heard all about
Diablo from Andrew by now, so he buried his nose in the
computer right away and kept it there for the next 200
miles. Of course the laptop had my road atlas software,
so Jonathan was also supposed to be the trip navigator.
After going about 10 miles toward San Diego after a wrong
turn at some particularly important freeway interchange,
I realized that my navigator was too busy dispatching
monsters to be of much help.
We hit some traffic through L.A. but still rolled up to
the Adam household about 40 minutes ahead of Brad,
(although I think they stopped to eat or something).
On to the rest of the LA trip.
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I popped in at Four Corners, because I'd
never been there, and did the requisite walk through 4
states in 3 seconds. I got back on the road in Arizona
and headed into the Indian reservation. A big long boring
stretch of road with a speed limit of 55. 
As I'm bombing along on 180 I
caught this picture of Humphrey's Peak, which is the
highest point in Arizona at 12,633 ft. Looks like the only
high spot in the state. One easily forgets that
the south rim of the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff are both
7000 feet above sea level and Phoenix is 6000 feet lower
and 40 degrees hotter. 
