I recently flew out to Arizona mid-January with my buddy Devin to go pickup my new car, a 2009 Subaru Forester. The trip started with our flight departing OKC at 5:30AM. We arrived in Phoenix at 7, just missing the sunrise. My aunt picked us up from the airport and we proceeded to park in the garage, there she was…The Suvvy. 

A little backstory – I’d driven a little truck, a 2007 Nissan Frontier ever since I got my license, and to put it nicely…the gas mileage sucked. Averaging 14 mpg on a good day. After a slew of issues and the dealership saying I had $5000 worth of things I needed to repair, I said goodbye to my car. It was time to get a car where the airbags actually worked and the gas mileage wasn’t ridiculous. When you go 90 mph in the Suvvy you can get 34 mpg, of course I wasn’t going that fast…wink wink. It gives me 26 mpg on average, not bad. 

The car was a plus of the trip, but Arizona was just waiting for us to explore it. I spent some time with my family, played some shuffleboard, hiked up a mountain, and had the best enchiladas I’d ever had in my entire life. Highly recommend Gadzooks if you are ever in the Phoenix area. It was time to venture off to our next destination though…The Grand Canyon. 

What happened next gave me a mini heart attack. Here I am driving my new car, it’s chugging up the mountain passes, and suddenly it begins to stutter. I have to pull over. I immediately lift the hood. I didn’t know what was wrong, just that I was standing on a mountain pass in the middle of somewhere I’d never been. My check-engine light was on. I knew that light all too well…not again. Fast forward a little bit, apparently cars can stutter when there is a large elevation change. The oil to air ratio of your carburetor can be thrown off due to the higher air pressure because of the elevation increase. Tempe sits around 1400 feet, and Flagstaff is nearly 7000 feet in elevation. The elevation change is close to 6000 feet.

We were planning to get to the Grand Canyon on January 13th around 12:00 PM. Our plans got delayed a little because of this hiccup. We didn’t have an ice scraper, we needed gas, we were hungry, I needed an oil change…the list kept going. We finally made it to the Grand Canyon at about 3:45 PM, two hours before sunset. 

The Grand Canyon was a sight I’d forgotten, the last time I visited was when I was pretty young and didn’t have any respect for the beauty of nature. I pulled my camera out and shot what I could. Devin and I enjoyed the sunset, hanging out until it was dark. It was one of the most peaceful moments I’d had in awhile. Seeing something so magnificent is really breath-taking.