Route 66 Road Trip Day One: Great Hotel, Horrible Middle Eastern Food In Scottsdale, Arizona
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I had such high hopes of rising at 4:00 am, placing the kids in the car, and then arriving in Scottsdale by the time they woke up. Nope. The alarm went off at 4:00 am (I actually use this version of The Navy Hymn as my alarm tone) and I hit snooze…again and again and again. Until it was 7:00 am.
We ended up not leaving the house until 8:30 am. Oh well…it was “vacation” after all. I don’t usually use an alarm so I’m really not used to one…it has been many years since my military days! Usually, I wake up between 6:00 am and 7:00 am with no assistance, though it did not help that we had a dinner party the night before and I was up late packing.
My wife Heidi and I have different tastes when it comes to coffee. That requires taking separate coffee breaks because that is one area we are not willing to compromise on! Our first stop was at the Starbucks in Cabazon, California on the Cabazon Indian Reservation…Heidi likes her Americano from Starbucks…
We continued on and I pulled over in Indio about 30 minutes further down the road and stopped at a lovely independent coffee shop called Everbloom. It was packed!
After a respectable cappuccino, we were off again.
This time, we did not stop until we hit the Arizona border. I had high hopes to pull over and take a picture beside every state sign, but as the trip progressed we ended up doing a lot of our travel at night and did not stop again or a road sign picture until we reached Oklahoma. There wasn’t much to see out the window on this portion of the trip…
I deliberately held off on refueling until we reached Arizona, where prices are over $1/gallon cheaper. We filled up in Quartzite.
Not more than 10 minutes after leaving the station, Augustine announced he had to use the bathroom…thankfully, there was a rest stop not too far…with warnings to watch out for snakes!
We reached the Andaz and it had been two decades since I was in Scottsdale…wow, what a posh city. Beautiful homes.
I deviated from Route 66 to spend our first night at the Andaz because I wanted to treat the kids to a nice hotel that had a pool. And so for the rest of the afternoon and again in the evening (and again the following morning) we spent a lot of time in the pool. And the pool was heated almost to a jacuzzi temperature…it was lovely.
Our room was nothing special, but I very much like the bungalow-style accomodations here. I’d definitely return to this property. I spent 29,000 World of Hyatt points for the night here (a peak night) because the prevailing rate was $768…I always coax a good value out of my Hyatt points.
I made dinner reservations at a restaurant around the corner from the hotel called Fat Ox, but ended up canceling because the kids suddenly began bitterly complaining about how hungry they were and I did not want to bring them to a nice restaurant and make them wait 30 minutes for dinner.
So instead we drove to the closest Middle Eastern place called Shawarma Express. What a mistake…
First off, it was expensive…$75 for essentially three entrees…which would have been okay if the food was god, but the food not only took far too long to come out, but it was bad. The chicken and hummus were mediocre, but the beef was disguising…the meat was so fatty. This place is an embarrassment to Middle Eastern food and I would not return.
We stopped at Trader Joe’s (where we should have eaten dinner) to pick up some food for the drive, then drove back to the hotel and sat down next to one of the fire pits before going to bed early. Despite the poor meal, it had been a great first day!
This trip report covers my road trip along the old Route 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago.