Driving Mr. Rob - Part 3 - Scottsdale to Twin Falls

Good thing we like desert.  Turns out there's a lot more of it in between Scottsdale and Twin Falls.

One of us was looking forward to driving over the new Hoover Dam bridge. One of us wasn't. We'd seen it partly built when we drove through on our way to the Kemp family reunion in Vail a couple of years before. This time, we saw dam signs (insert "dam" joke here, Tommy!) and then we didn't. What bridge?

Here's what it looked like after we made a second run at it:

And here's what it looked like while we're driving over it:

And here's what Mr. Rob looked like as we drove over it:

Contrary to Mr. Rob's noticeable terror as shown above, the dam engineers somehow managed to take away any sense that you're driving across an awesome piece of engineering!  We went right over it without knowing.  A total rip-off.

There's a point at which Hwy 93 out of Las Vegas briefly meets Hwy 375 before you get on to what's called the "2nd loneliest road in America" - Hwy 318.  When we looked at our GPS, it read: "Extraterrestrial Highway."  Yep.  You can google it if you want.  Hwy 375 was named the E.T. Highway back in 1996 after there were lots of UFO sightings from there.  Also, it's right up there near Area 51.

So we were weirdly delighted when at that point, our cellphone power dropped to nothing, and our trusty GPS lost all sense of where we were.

And then we went through a town called... well, "Nothing."

A disappearing bridge, an extraterrestrial highway, sudden cell drop off, lost GPS, and a town called "Nothing." What was the universe trying to tell us?

The rest of the drive to Twin Falls was dramatic in other ways.  As in the skies.

I had to double check to see when these were taken.  But the last one (with the blue sky) was taken a half hour AFTER the first two.  

We reached Twin Falls around 9:45 pm and went straight over to Idaho Joe's Restaurant. The sign on the front said it was open until 11 pm. The fact that they were actually shampooing the carpet should have been a giveaway that something wasn't right.  I had a bowl of chili and Rob had a chicken pot pie and decaf.  By the time we'd finished, we were the only ones in the place.  When Rob asked for a refill on the coffee, our waitress said she'd thrown the coffee out, but would be happy to make a fresh pot if he'd like.  As the carpet shampooers drew closer, it began to dawn on us that maybe they were closing.  Had we read the sign wrong?  Or.... had we entered... a... different... time zone?

Yep, different time zone it was.  Here's the deal.  It's Arizona that threw us off.  Arizona is officially in the Mountain time zone but doesn't follow daylight savings time, so it ends up like Pacific time in the summer.  Then Nevada is in the Pacific zone.  But Idaho is Mountain.  So we'd gone from Pacific, to Mountain acting like Pacific, back to Pacific, and then to Mountain. We thought it was 10:30, but in Idaho, it was 11:30.  

We finally got the hint.  We left Idaho Joe's for the nearest Best Western or Red Lion or Holiday Inn.  I forget.  A confused end to a confusing day.