Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Cyber Monday Edition of SORT
As of Monday, November 29, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1994 Mazda MX-5 Miata 1985 Toyota Pickup 4×4 1967 VW Panel Van
Unlike last week’s Miata, I would own this one. As a matter of fact, I did own one just like it, just with black cloth interior instead of this one’s beige leather. I should have waited a week before picking a Toyota pickup. This one has awesome 80s graphics, a larger cabin and comes with its own motorcycle. No Dodge van this week, so I picked the next best thing, a Volkswagen panel bus, which is just begging for some shag carpet and a bed in the back.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 2003 Mazda MX-5 Miata Sold for $16,000 on 11/26/21
Off-Road: 1981 Toyota Pickup 4×4 Sold for $18,000 on 11/29/21
Touring: 1977 Dodge B200 Sold for $40,000 on 11/29/21

Fun With Numbers

New Mexico Trip Edition

The trip was to help a friend start to set up her new household in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The house is in the quintessential New Mexico adobe style and has 4 bedrooms and 3-1/2 baths with 10′ ceilings. Quite large for a single woman, but this is because she expects visits from several wings of her extended family (of which we are part of), some possibly overlapping.

She had received some of her furniture and kitchen stuff, so we at least had a bed to sleep on, but the rest of the place was, well, very uncluttered. Sally had really only been in the house for the past 2 weeks and she still had boxes everywhere that needed unpacking, Donna helped with that, and I went around and changed out a bunch of non-working light bulbs and a few other small “handyman” type jobs.

We were away from home for 10 days, 7 of them were traveling the roads of 5 of this country’s west and the other 3 were spent in and around 1 city, in 1 of those states. The rental car was ours for a total of 11 days in which we drove 2,819 miles. On the one total day that our Mitsubishi Outlander Sport was not traveling we added 5 miles picking it up, grocery shopped on our return, filling it up, picking up the Mini and returning it.

We bought gas a total of 8 times and purchased 92 gallons for $362 for an average cost of $3.93 per gallon. This is skewed a little lower because we used our Kroger gas points for 2 of the 8 fill ups, with out these points our average cost would have been $4.08 per gallon. The most expensive gas in Utah at $4.599 and the cheapest was in New Mexico at a Native American Pueblo. We averaged 30.5 MPG which is pretty good gas mileage for the size of the Outlander Sport.

We spent 5 nights in a motel, 4 of which were in Holiday Inn Expresses. The lone off-brand night was in Beatty, Nevada, because there are literally only a half dozen motels in town, and that was in a Motel 6. We spent $615 total on motels for an average of $123 a night. The most expensive stay was in Carson City, Nevada. And the least expensive was also in Nevada, the Motel 6 in Beatty.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Thanksgiving Week Edition of SORT
As of Monday, November 22, 2021 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2003 Mazda MX-5 Miata 1981 Toyota Pickup 4×4 1977 Dodge B200
This is a joke, IMHO this is the worst Miata color ever, I’d really bid on this one. Back when small trucks were actually small and didn’t have names. Proof positive that #vanlife was at its peak long before Instagram or TikTok.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to, if the reserve was not met.
Sports: 2010 Mazda RX-8 R3 Sold for $22,500 on 11/19/211
Off-Road: 1984 Jeep Grand Wagoneer Sold for $69,500 on 11/17/21
Touring: 1956 Nash Statesman Super Sedan Sold for $11,000 on 11/18/21

Home Base

Miata and Outlander

Got back in town around 1:30 and 4 hours later and we are all unpacked, clothes washed and put away. It’s almost like we never left… Except for the weird garage combo.

I received a text on Thursday that the Mini is done and ready for retrieval. On Monday morning we will stop and refuel the Outlander Sport, pick up the Mini and on the way back by drop off the rental. Then once again the garage contents will back the way they belong.

Penultimate Day

Today was our next to last day on this little vacation road trip and it was all Nevada, all the time, along US-395. We started in Beatty which is currently the only entrance to Death Valley National Park on this side, and ended up in Carson City, the state’s capitol. In between was pretty much nothing but beautiful desert scenery pretty similar to what is pictured above.

When traveling this route you had better be cognizant of you level of gas, because there are two spots where there is no gas for around a hundred miles, between Beatty and Tonopah is 93 miles and Tonopah to Hawthorne is 103.

The best thing we did today wasn’t even on our true route. After breakfast at Mel’s Dinner in Beatty we crossed the street to check out a small park and found a brochure on a display about something called the Goldwell Open Air Museum that was less than 10 miles in the opposite direction we were supposed to head.

The last time we were here we passed right by this spot in the evening to visit Rhyolite, which are ruins of 1905 gold-mining town, Hollywood movie set & now a historic site. That time it was fast approaching dark, so we either didn’t notice the artwork or we scoffed at the hand-painted sign that said ‘Art Museum’ on that same dirt road.

Anyway, if you are a fan of Roadside America stuff or off-the-wall art, the Goldwell Open Air Museum is worth a visit if you are ever that way. And it’s FREE!

36,000 Slot Machines

Not too far north of Sin City our rental SUV saw thirty-six thousand miles on the odometer.

1) If you are ever in Flagstaff, Arizona at breakfast time do yourself a favor and avoid the draw of the chain restaurants and head over to Mike and Rondas The Place. Great service, excellent & plentiful food that will probably cost less than those other pedestrian places.

2) The city that built the Hoover Dam where we had lunch at a chain we had never seen before, Capriotti’s. Man where has this place been all our lives? The Cheesesteak sandwiches were great. The photo is of a monument to the hard hat that was first required to be worn during the building of the Hoover (Boulder) Dam where the motto was “Safety First.”

3) About 20 miles south of our destination for the day was Big Dune, a 300 foot high collection of sand dunes. We thought, let’s check it out. After a couple miles down a paved road, we turned onto a sandy road. We never got any closer than this because we turned around when we started slipping and didn’t want to get stuck.

We’re Getting Our Kicks

After 3 fun days of helping a friend set up in her new house in Santa Fe, we are headed home. We drove several miles of the Mother Road, AKA Old US-66, which made a nice change of pace from slotting in amongst the 60 million semis that crowd along I-40. This was taken in Holbrook, AZ as we passed through. Later, when we passed through Winslow I thought about stopping and taking a picture on a random street corner, but by then all we could think about was getting to our hotel in Flagstaff.