2018 Jumbo Road Trip

2018 Jumbo Road Trip Food

We try to eat adventurously when on the road and so for our memory and your pleasure, I kept track of the good ones. This way if we are ever back in the same town again we know where to stop or if you ever find yourselves in one of these towns you can find a good meal. We were 14 days on the road out to Lake Tahoe and ate nine note worthy meals and it took us 11 days coming back and ran into four (one of which was a return trip to a breakfast spot in Albuquerque.)

Tuesday, May 1st, lunch in Kosciusko, MS – Old Trace Grill – Brian, Patty Melt and Donna, Grilled Shrimp

Wednesday, May 2nd, breakfast in Vicksburg, MS – The Mad Baker – Brian, breakfast biscuit and Donna, 2 eggs, cheese grits and bacon

Thursday, May 3rd, lunch in Henderson, TX – Debbie’s Bistro – Split, grilled cheese and green chili and rice soup

Friday, May 4th, breakfast in Tyler, TX – The Diner – Donna Eggs and Bacon and Brian, Grilled Banana French Toast

Monday, May 7th, breakfast in Albuquerque, NM – Central Grill and Coffee House – Donna, Eggs Benedict and Brian, Waffle Dogs

Tuesday, May 8th, lunch in Madrid, NM – Jezebel Soda Fountain – Both, Breakfast Burito

Thursday, May 10th, dinner in Green River, UT – Tamarisk Restaurant – Split Pork Chops

Saturday, May 12th, lunch (breakfast) in Winnemucca, NV – The Griddle – Donna, Eggs Benedict and Brian, Pecan Encrusted French Toast

Sunday, May 13th, lunch in Carson City, NV – Scoups – Brian, Vegetarian Chili and Donna, Chicken Spaetzle with a scoop of ice cream for dessert.

Sunday, May 20th, dinner in Beatty, NV – KC’s Outpost – The food was OK, but the homemade cake for dessert was worth it.

Tuesday, May 22nd, lunch outside Holbrook, AZ – Painted Desert Visitor Center Cafe – Donna, Lamb Soup and Brian, Navajo Taco.

Wednesday, May 23rd, breakfast in Albuquerque, NM – Central Grill and Coffee House – Donna, Eggs Benedict and Brian, Huevos Rancheros

Wednesday, May 30th, lunch in Milledgeville, GA – The Brick – Split Spinach Artichoke Dip and a small Sausage, Pepperoni, Black Olives & Spinach Pizza

Wendover Will

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobblestone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64 foot tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

Fun with Figures

Day 2 of Not Being on our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

We were gone for 31 days and of those, 20 were spent driving from one place to another. There was a day in west Texas visiting Donna’s brother, a couple days in Albuquerque, seven days in Lake Tahoe and another day in Louisiana visiting a friend. We filled up with gas 18 times and used a total of 190 gallons for the 7,291 mile trip for an average of 38.4 miles per gallon.

The Mini uses premium fuel and I never really shopped around so take these numbers for what they are worth. The cheapest gas (besides the original fill up at home) was in Pelham, AL at $2.95 a gallon. The next cheapest was in Albuquerque, NM at $2.96. The highest was in Reno, NV at $3.72 a gallon and the second highest was also in Nevada in West Wendover at $3.63. For the trip we averaged $3.21 a gallon and spent a grand total of $677.05 on fuel.

Like I did 9 years ago with a rental car when we went out west, I attached a static cling travel bug to the back of the Lady Bug for our drive to and from the west, And just like that one no one spotted it on the car and logged it. I dipped it in about half of the geocaches we did along the way to rack up some miles anyway. Because the mileage for travel bugs is tallied in a “as the crow flies” manner between caches it only totaled only 4,834 miles compared to the 7,291 the car itself traveled.

We geocached for 17 of the 31 days on the trip. We looked for 70 caches. We found 63 and DNF’d seven for a success rate of 90%. Our biggest day was finding 12 caches, missing 2, on a Tuesday in Albuquerque1 while walking along some trails near the Rio Grande River. We found the most, 23, in surprise, Texas the state we spent the most time in. We found the fewest in Louisiana, just one on the way back thru and by grabbing 15 caches in Nevada we added another state cached in to bring our total to 30.

Home Again Home Again Jiggity-Jig

Day 31 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Montgomery, AL to Aiken, SC. This is all the stuff we carried with us on the trip.

  1. My clothes
  2. Donna’s clothes
  3. Our dress-up clothes for the wedding (dry cleaned and pressed on arrival)
  4. Donna’s hiking boots and casual shoes
  5. My hiking boots and sneakers
  6. Bathroom items (including our Water-Pik)
  7. Our favorite soft drinks and snacks
  8. Kitchen items (paper towels, plastic mugs, etc.)
  9. Three days worth of dirty clothes (which is why #1 & #2 aren’t bulging)
  10. Laptop bag
  11. Soft-sided cooler with ice packs for cooling the day’s drinks and snacks
  12. Geocaching knapsack
  13. Hiking sticks

The Mini’s back seats were folded down and the three black bags (1,2,3), the laptop bag (10) and the soft-sided cooler (11) were on top of them, the rest of the items were strategically crammed into the “trunk area” behind the seats and under the cover. About 90% of this stuff made the trip into the hotel room each night. We used a cart to haul it all up in the evening, then usually made two trips down each morning to load the car back up.

Penultimate Day Drive

Day 30 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Hammond, LA to Montgomery, AL. No geocaching or sightseeing today because of the weather and probably none for tomorrow either as we will be anxious to just get back home.

When we got up in Hammond in the morning I checked the radar and I could see the rain bands still circling around the center of Alberto with the bottom of them around Montgomery. The sky was threatening all day, but it hardly sprinkled on the drive here and it is yet to rain, but from the looks of the sky as we walked back to the hotel after dinner it might pour at any minute.

It finally did rain and rain hard for about 2 hours just around sunset. Thunder and lightning included, but I think Alberto is too far north to mess with us anymore. If we run into any precipitation on the way home tomorrow it will be of the usual heat and humidity fueled summer afternoon variety.

Mandeville Morning

Day 29 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Hammond, LA. We are staying at a Holiday Inn here, not an Express, so no free breakfast, but when we checked in they gave us a voucher worth $20 towards breakfast at the in-house restaurant. Due to past experiences at Holiday Inn hotel restaurants we didn’t take advantage of it on the first morning, but for some reason we thought it might be worth a try today. If it wasn’t that good there was nothing ventured as it would be free. There was a buffet, but we thought we should order off the menu to make sure we got something fresh. Donna ordered her go to, Eggs Benedict, I just ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns and sausage. We should have known better.

It seemed to take an awful long time for the food to arrive. When it did arrive and the waitress put the plates down in front of us, mine looked fine, but Donna’s looked weird. The hollandaise sauce was a dark orange color and the ham slices were a 1/2″ thick. She took one taste of the sauce and it was awful. I dipped my fork in it and confirmed her opinion. It was inedible. She called the waitress back and told her that the food was disgusting. Waitress apologized, the manager visited and he apologized and Donna ended up just eating from the buffet. My scrambled eggs were fine and the sausage was half decent, but my hash browns looked exactly like hers (that came off the buffet) and my toast was at best, warm. We can now guarantee that this was the absolute last time we will ever eat at a Holiday Inn restaurant ever.

After eating we took another early morning drive over to Mandeville. Not for beignets this time, but for a nice walk along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The temperature was in the 70’s, there was a slight breeze off the lake, hardly a cloud in the sky and you could see the causeway stretching to the horizon. On the way back to Hammond we did get a good breakfast. Donna got a chocolate covered chocolate cake doughnut and I had glazed cinnamon twist from Dat’s Us Deaux-Nuts in Ponchatoula.

Let’s Stay an Extra Day

Day 28 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Hammond, LA. Our original intent was to be on the road home tomorrow, but our travel vector and the vector of TS Alberto would have collided in our Monday overnight town of Montgomery, Alabama about the time we would be getting on the road Tuesday morning, so we have opted to stay another day.

Donna wanted some beignets from Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter for breakfast today, but I refused to drive into New Orleans. We compromised by visiting one of their other locations in Mandeville which is a lot closer and still on this side of the lake. We also spent some of the day catching up with our woman in the State Department, Donna’s childhood friend, and her mom the nonagenarian.