The barbed wire fence was little deterrent as this water tank along NM14 and it got a very colorful paint job. There was a geocache just a little further north along the fence.
Didn’t have time to work up a post tonight because I’m busy playing with my new toy, a HP iPAQ HX2495b. We borrowed a PDA to use on vacation for paperless geocaching and liked it so much that I bought on off fleabay. I got one with the bigger battery, so it should be interesting to see how long it will run compared to the borrowed unit. It didn’t come with a stylus (through oversight or on purpose by the seller), so right now I’m using a q-tip with the fuzz cut off to navigate around. I wrote the seller and we’ll see if he drops one in the mail or I have to buy one.
I also started weeding out some of the 551 pictures we took on vacation to get it down to some sort of managable level for posting online here and sharing with friends and coworkers (without boring them too much more than it already will just by its mention.)
Don’t take my word for it, believe the folks at Roadside America.
On our way to Alamogordo, NM to visit White Sands, we stumbled onto rows of small skinny trunked trees along side of the road. An orchard of some sort. Than we say this giant statue and put two and two together, they were pistachio trees. We stopped in at Pistachio Tree Ranch AKA: McGinn’s Country Store & Arena Blanca Winery for some nuts and souvenirs.
While traveling the roads of Nebraska, New Mexico and eastern Colorado you will see various forms of this sign. This picture is from New Mexico, but my favorite is from Colorado where it reads WINDS MAY BE GUSTY. While they probably hope you interpret the sign as “WINDS MAY BE GUSTY“, for some reason I read it as “WINDS MAY BE GUSTY”. Like they weren’t sure there was such a thing as gusty winds.
Trust me though, there *were* gusty winds and they were powerful enough to make it difficult to drive in a straight line for me in a Mustang. I imagine it was a lot harder on 18 wheelers and motor homes to stay in their lane.
More often than not, less than a 1/4 mile after the gusty winds signs there was a big sign giving a toll free number to report suspected DUI drivers. Just how were you supposed to know? Everybody was bobbing and weaving…
Before I got to the end of our street on the way to work this morning the Emperor flashed past the 90,000 milestone.
Here at home, music is served up in the Emperor via MP3s recorded on 10 CDs stored in a changer in the trunk. I have not listened to over the air radio for, well, as far back as I can remember (which due to repeated drug use in my youth, is not far), so what was I to do for two weeks in a rental car. It will be a base model, so would it have an iPod interface? Doesn’t matter, don’t have one anyway. Probably have a CD player, but all my audio CDs are long gone. Satellite radio? Doubtful. Hey wait a minute, a friend in the Miata Club has an extra Sirius unit that I could borrow, brilliant.
For testing purposes I temporarily hooked up the Visor in the Miata. Not bad, there were a couple channels I could enjoy and even a few I could listen to for a while, nice.
The expected Chrysler Sebring turned into a Ford Mustang and it had a CD player that read MP3s. I had brought along a couple of my Radio Paradise MP3 CDs for listening to on the laptop in case of spotty internet or whatever, so I popped one in and off we went.
The Mustang even had an extra ciggy lighter socket along side the external input jack in the console which would make powering up the Sat Radio real easy. My intention was to at the first early evening stop to install the Visor. Well one day led to the next when we weren’t done driving and seeing the sites until 7:00-7:30 at night, so I didn’t even get a chance to try the install until the sixth night of vacation.
I ran the antenna cable from the trunk through the rear seat backs gap, plugged in the power cord, hooked both into the unit and hit ON. Nothing. OK, maybe the key needs to be in run before the aux power jack is hot. Nope. Dang, did I break the radio in transit? I plugged it into the primary cigarette lighter in the upper center of the dash and sure enough the satellite radio came right on.
So what gave? Was that port broke (blown fuse?) or was it there but not hooked up because the car didn’t have a certain option package? Anyway, I didn’t want to drive around with the wire draping down the middle of the front of the dash and I didn’t want to have to worry about unplugging it every time we stopped where any nefarious individuals would think there was something worth stealing, so in the end I wrapped the Visor unit all back up and stored it the luggage.
I think we ended up playing those 2 CDs four times through (alternately) for the 2 weeks. Each disc holds about 170 songs, so it really didn’t come off as too repetitious.
Thanks anyway Rudy.
0 miles from home.
Easy flight back, we started to get some heavy turbulence somewhere over middle America, so the pilot got clearance to fly at a higher altitude. When we got up there, there must have been a better tailwind because we spent only 2:55 in the air as opposed to the scheduled 3-1/2 hours.
We used that extra thirty-five minutes to catch 3 quick caches on the way home, 2 in Fort Mill and another in Blythewood. There were still a couple left on the GPSr to do, but we could only put off the inevitable so long, we came straight home from number three.
Sorry for the Travel Bug follow the route link yesterday, didn’t realize you had to be a member and log in to see the map. So here is an image you can see – take a look.
The first things we did when we got here was for Donna to mow the weeds in both the front and back yard while I blew the piles of oak pollen clusters off the deck and the driveway. Then the Emperor got a much needed bath. The poor boy spend the last 2 weeks parked outside the Charlotte Airport Holiday Inn and there was a nice layer of baked on pine pollen on all his horizontal surfaces.
Tomorrow it is back to reality.
1344 miles from home.
That is the hotel across the street from where we are staying taken from our 6th floor room. We did some laundry, watched some TV and relaxed a lot, but we did also get out today and do some geocaching within a 10 mile radius of the hotel. We found seven of eight caches and probably would have found all of them, but it was a cloudy, chilly day and our hearts just weren’t into it. This brought our total for the vacation to 48 found, 7 missed (although that may rise as we plan on trying a couple on the way home from the airport tomorrow.
To streamline tomorrow morning’s early flight process we turned in the rental car this afternoon. Total mileage driven in the slightly more than 14 days in our possession was 3,593 or an average of 256 miles a day. Which seems sort of poetic as the total bill for all those miles was $256.
I didn’t log the Rental Car Travel Bug into all the caches we found but try and get enough so you could get an outline of the trip. See the map for a look.
Of the sixteen nights on the road there were 6 spent in Bed & Breakfasts, the rest were various hotels. Three of those were HIE (mmm…cinnamon buns), 2 plain Holiday Inns, these two in a Courtyard and then some other random chains.
Vacations are great, but we are ready to be getting home (not necessarily to go back to work.) We had lunch before the last couple of caches today and are now so tired of eating out that we decided to go to some place really different, McDonald’s. Almost looking forward to making a meal out of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.
