Almost 22,000 Half Feet High

Day 8 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Albuquerque, NM to Albuquerque, NM. No geocaching today, but we didn’t just sit around the hotel. First we went out to breakfast on the edge of Old Town at the Central Grill and Coffee House. Donna had her go to Eggs Benedict and I opted for the Waffle Dogs (maple sausage links, dipped in waffle batter and deep fried.) Afterwards we drove over to the minor league baseball stadium to check out parking and seating locations. The Albuquerque Isotopes are a Triple A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies and they were playing a matinee game that we thought we might attend.

When we did head over to the game we were unpleasantly surprised to find out that for a week day morning start the place was probably going to sell out the 13,000 plus stadium. Traffic was creeping along to get to parking and there were hoards of people walking towards the stadium. As we got closer and noticed the crowds trying to get into the park we decided we didn’t want to see a baseball game after all.

Instead we took a drive up to the top of Sandia Peak to get a look back down on the town Albuquerque from nearly 22,000 half-feet (10,679 whole feet) high. After coming back down we drove north towards Santa Fe on scenic NM14. We stopped in the small artsy community of Madrid1 where we spent one night instead of two back in 2009.

In spite of it being an off day we drove almost 200 miles and just south of Madrid the Lady Bug ticked over the 22,000 mile mark.

Aliens Crash Land in New Mexico

Day 7 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Monahans, TX. to Albuquerque, NM. Finally made up for our slight of Roswell, NM back in 2009 by making it through here on this trip. If it wasn’t for this very interesting “Welcome To” diorama south of town, the several little green men statues in random spots and the International UFO Museum & Research Center (we did go in) this could be any other town of 50,000 people in a desert setting. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but this wan’t it.

This was our longest mileage day, so there was not a lot of time for geocaching. We looked for just 2, the one that was near the above picture on the south side of Roswell and one on the north side that was near the road that branches off US285 leading to the 1947 UFO crash site.

Sand in My Shoes

Day 6 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Monahans, TX. to Monahans, TX. A rest day and visit with Donna’s brother day. But first, we got up early and headed just a few miles east of Monahans to do a little geocaching in the Sandhills State Park. We parked in one spot and followed the road for a little under a half mile through the campground to the first cache.

After signing the log we thought it would be cool to walk directly across the dunes to the other cache about a mile away. We made it to about halfway before giving up and getting in the car to drive over to the next one. Turns out it was fun to walk on the dunes, but not that fun.

Much to our chagrin, the second cache was hidden in the middle of the dunes, so we ended up having to “bushwack” our way across the sand about an 1/4 of a mile one way. On this section though there was a lot more desert vegetation making the sand firmer and easier to walk on than the nothing-but-sand sand first trek.

The third and last cache was an Earth Cache where there is no actual container, but questions to answer. There were three questions that needed answering here and we couldn’t find the answers in the usual places, ie. the informational kiosks or signs on the trails. So we went inside the visitor’s center and asked the ranger, she must get that a lot as she had them written down right at the front desk.

We were four for four today as we had picked up one in the town of Monahans itself before making it out to the stat park.

The Windmills of Your Mind

Day 5 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Abilene, TX. to Monahans, TX. At a scheduled 205 miles, today’s drive is the second shortest of the trip, so we “killed” some time by first driving into downtown Abilene and walking around looking at the 17 storybook statues that are located near the Visitors Bureau.

We also did a bit of geocaching on our short backroad trip west, again finding 4 of the 5 we looked for.

We drove by two separate wind farm installations on the route, one near the town of Merkel, which has the audacity to call itself the Windmill City and one outside Lemesa where this photo was taken, while we hunted for a geocache along US180. Whenever we encounter a wind farm like this I start to hear in my mind the song The Windmills of Your Mind from the original The Thomas Crowne Affair movie.

Tonight’s meal was Mexican. We have been avoiding it as a cuisine on the trip so far, so that we could reserve our taste buds until we got closer to the real deal. We might have waited another day or so until we got into New Mexico, but Donna’s brother Steve, the reason for the stop in this west Texas town, suggested it for dinner.

21,000 Indian Blankets


Day 4 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Tyler, TX. to Abilene, TX. Like avoiding big cities, another hallmark of a Bogardus road trip is at least one meal a day at a local spot and today because we were at a regular Holiday Inn instead of an Express2, we drove a couple miles down the road to a place called The Diner. We highly recommend eating here if you ever find yourself in Tyler and if you go for breakfast, you absolutely need to try the Banana French Toast3.

Instead of geocaching along the route today, after breakfast we headed over to a local park in Tyler that had a walking trail with a bunch of caches. On our mile and a half walk we found 4 of the 5 we looked for.

On FM2114 between Laguna Park and the town of West the road was lined along both sides wild flowers. Finally I could stand it no longer, so I found a spot that led to a ranch entrance and pulled off to take a picture. While I was circling the car looking in a field of Indian Blanket flowers for the image I wanted, Donna was inside the car taking pictures of me. Not too far west of West, Texas, which is now my second favorite town name, right after North, South Carolina, the Ladybug rode past its twenty first thousandth mile.

I would like to tell you we gave the car a bath when we stopped for the night in celebration of this milestone, but it was really for washing off the bird blood off the hood and windshield. About 15 miles outside of Abilene on I-20, with Donna at the wheel, a bird decided to fly right into the front of the Mini. For the record I still lead in bird kills 2 to 1 having scooped one of them up in the mouth of the Miata back in 2008 and 2015.

We in TEXAS Again1


Day 3 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Vicksburg, MS to Tyler, TX. I had picked out a breakfast spot not too far from the hotel, Caffe Paradiso, but when we pulled into the parking lot 3 minutes before their scheduled opening, there were no cars around. Donna popped out, peered into the dark windows and saw zero activity, so we opted for plan B. I found another place in downtown on the internet that sounded promising called The Mad Baker. It was worth the drive, the food was great and Donna bought a souvenir T-shirt.

We have been staying away from President Eisenhower’s National System of Interstate and Defense Highways as much as possible, but after two days that consisted of almost entirely back road driving we blasted across Louisiana on I-20. Just 3 miles shy of doing the entire 189 miles of the state’s Interstate we popped off in Greenwood to loop south a bit towards our overnight stop of Tyler, TX.

We knew we were in Texas long before we saw the sign because the bumpy, cracked, hastily patched two-lane road turned into a smooth as a baby’s bottom, well maintained four-lane. You can tell the oil money in Texas finds its way into the infrastructure unlike in Louisiana, where in ends up lining the pockets of the corrupt political machine.

1. verb omitted in homage to a previous Texas related visit post from five years ago

 

We’re the Hekawi


Day 2 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Birmingham, AL to Vicksburg, MS. Seeing as we are in the Mini and not the Miata, there are no Moss Motoring Challenge photos to take, so to occupy our time while travelling just 200-300 miles a day we are falling back on an old sideline – Geocaching.

For the first 5 days, until we get to Donna’s brother Steve’s house in Monahans, TX, I have mapped out our routes on the geocaching website and downloaded the 40 or 50 caches that we could look for along the way. We will definitely be cherry-picking a whole lot less than that each day, but you never really ever know what or where you might feel like a break from driving.

If you make a custom route on Google Maps, you can save it, but if you call it back up using the app on your phone it loses all the changes and presents you with typical Interstate, fastest time, route to just the destination. If you create the custom route in Google’s My Maps app online and then call it up on your phone the map is there, but you cannot get turn by turn directions from it, nor will it follow the phones GPS, so it is worthless.

Once you have saved a map on the geocaching website it turns it into a GPX file that you can download that is of a rough approximation (ie. doesn’t smoothly follow the actual roads) of the route. This cannot be imported into a Garmin car GPS to use, as in motion routing so that is no help. But I did find an app online, GPX Viewer Pro, that does work for this on my phone. It is not perfect, but it is fine.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere Alabama we were following along the GPX track fine until we came to a spot where we needed to take a left turn, but there were two of them just 20 feet apart. The GPX resolution was not accurate enough to single out which one to take, so I took the first one. This was a Grade ‘D’ road, it was narrow, really rough surfaced and bumpy as all get out. I asked my navigator to look at the map and let me know how long I was going to be heading in this direction until the next new road. “Eight or nine miles,” came the reply. I said, “Maybe it was the other left. Let’s go back and try that road.” She said, “Let’s.”

I turned around, found the second left and headed southeast again. This road was no better. And it got worse in a hurry, less than a mile in, it turned to gravel. another u-turn and when we got back to the spot between the two turns I pulled off and parked so we could figure out a plan (the above photo is what we saw when we stopped.) We ended up backtracking about 10 miles to get on an actual numbered state highway and gave up on the geocaching for the day.