2025 Jumbo Road Trip

Santa Fe, NM – Day 21: Check Surroundings For Safety or Big Robot, Little Dog

Eighty Foot Tall Robot

Today’s Roadside America picture is of an 80-foot-tall robot that shares a parking lot with a giant spider and a huge wolf here in Santa Fe. It only added a couple miles to my morning run to Dunkin.

After finishing my breakfast and coffee, it was time to head south to the town that Bugs Bunny keeps making wrong turns in, Albuquerque, to visit the Revlimiter Factory to get some nifty custom gauges installed. Adam will install the gauge faces for you for an extra fee, but you have to remove them from the car and mail them to him. Instead of mailing my cluster to Adam, I brought the whole car to him. I disassembled what seems like the entire dashboard of the car with his guidance so we could get the gauge cluster out of the car. Adam then gloved up like a surgeon to swap out the actual faces. We then tag-teamed the reinstallation and assembly of the dash.

I was so busy “fan girling” about being at the epicenter of Revlimiterness that I forgot to take any pictures. Adam actually moved the famous Sharka out onto the driveway, under a tree no less, so that I could pull into the garage. Mona, the transforming ND RF, was parked in one garage bay over. Anyway, the pics below happened once I got back to Santa Fe.

I had one last request of Adam. Some people get Tom Matano, a founding father of the Miata, to sign their trunk lid. Hah, that’s nothing. I got Mr. Revlimiter to sign my trunk lid, right on his sticker. And I got to meet Mabel the wonder dog too, and she loves me. I got the sticker to prove it.

Santa Fe, NM – Day 20: “I Made Rice!”

Gates of Santa Fe 3


Gates of Santa Fe 3 
Tonight was dinner in, and Sally cooked us up some shrimp etouffee. It was supposed to be something else but came as a last-minute addition because there was a nice deal at Smith’s for raw shrimp at $4.99 a pound. This also means she got to try out a microwave rice cooker her friend Kevin recommended.

Ever since she has lived in Santa Fe, she has not been able to get her rice fully cooked. The center always ended up crunchy, and if it was cooked more, the rice would be mushy. She is blaming it on the 7,000′ elevation, but it also might be the lack of moisture in the desert air.

The cooker came with instructions that laid out how much water and how long to cook it for several different types of rice. I was also optimized for an 800-watt microwave, so she had to cook it at 80% power in her 1,000-watt oven. When she tasted the rice, she proudly shouted, “I Made Rice!” Quickly followed by, “There’ll be no living with Kevin now.”

Bonus Roadside America photo:

Life-size Brontosaurus Family

Santa Fe, NM – Day 19: Baby It’s Cold Outside

Shop Here


 
This morning we woke to colder than normal May weather in Santa Fe, the temps were in the mid 30’s. My morning drive to get a Dunkin’ coffee was shrouded in fog. The temperature barely moved, and if anything, they decreased close to freezing. Then it started raining lightly on and off, and there might have been a flurry or two in there as well.

Because we didn’t walk much in Hammond, and yesterday in Santa Fe we barely walked a 1/4 mile before it started to drip from the sky and we turned tail for home, we decided to go walking/shopping at the semi-filled Santa Fe Place Mall. We were still shopping for shoes for Sally, and she did find a pair at another Shoe Show or Shoe Town or Show Something.

Wanting more, we headed over to the almost really empty Fashion Outlets of Santa Fe to the Merrill store. It advertised “Buy One, Get One 1/2 Price.” I was sort of shopping for shoes too since I donated the Skechers Step-Ins because the tread pattern was a magnet for small rocks that I had to pick out every time I walked in them. She found a pair that was on clearance that started at $50 and was marked down to $25. I, of course, found a pair of Jungle Mocs that I used to wear back in my ASCO days and loved, at the full price of $99.

Naturally they take the 50% off of the cheapest shoes, so Sally got out of there at a measly $12.50 while I spent nearly a C-note. When I tried to reason with her that maybe she should give me $12.50 seeing as I bought that pair of expensive shoes, I sort of earned it. What if I didn’t buy shoes? She shut me up with, “I’d just buy a second pair.” Sigh.

Santa Fe, NM – Day 17: I Despise I Forty

Sunrise Shovel

Back to an actual Roadside America picture that you can find on the website, this is the Largest Shovel in Texas. How do they know? Just because the construction company that put it up says so? Texas is pretty big; maybe there is a bigger one in the eastern side of the state. They estimate it is 15′ tall, and to me, that doesn’t sound that big. And even if it is the largest, someone will take that as a challenge and make one 25′ tall somewhere else in the state.

From Bowie, TX to Santa Fe, NM is approximately 550 miles, and almost exactly one half of that drive was along I-40. Today there was a pretty stiff crosswind, and it seemed like 80% of the traffic was 18-wheelers trying to stay in their lanes. Lone truck drivers hauling ass, corporate drivers who might be speed limited, and any others that might be worried about many points they have on their driver’s licenses. Mix in pickups hauling giant camper homes and skittish auto drivers, and you make for a very exciting, AKA tense, drive.

When I do head east next weekend, I will only cross I-40 once on my way to get on US-60 & 84 to get to Lubbock, TX where I’ll pick up US-82 to finish off Texas. I’m sure I will run into plenty of big rigs, but it should be easier to pick them off (pass) one at a time than when they are in a big formation like B-17s on their way to bomb Berlin.

Bowie, TX – Day 16: Rust in Peace

Rust in Peace


 
No actual Roadside America picture today, but if the photos here in this post don’t technically qualify, at least for me they sure do.

For the second morning in a row I slept right through my alarm. I have it set for 6:00 AM and I woke up both days at 6:20 without hearing it. It is not like I changed the alarm sound; it is the same one I’ve been using for months, so tonight I’m going to change it to a bugler playing reville.

Kinda wish I could find what they used to play aboard the U.S.S. Midway when I served aboard it in the 70s. They didn’t actually use a bugle, the officer of the deck, at 6 AM would announce, “Reveille, now reville, drop your cocks and grab your socks.” “The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces.” “Sweepers, man your brooms, fore and aft.”

Nowadays, with women serving aboard ships, I wonder how that first phrase could be modified for the female gender?

Hammond – Day 15: Four Forks and a Feeding Frenzy

Sally has been talking about wanting to go to B&J’s Seafood to get a po’boy almost since we got here. But family plans have been getting the preferential treatment so far. There was a moment earlier this week when it could have happened, but the parking lot was overflowing, and even the across-the-street lot was full.

Sweet Heat For Your Meat

It had to happen today because it was our last day in Hammond, and Louisiana. If it didn’t happen, she would have been talking about not getting to eat from there all the way back to Santa Fe, so we broke down and set out early for a meal. She got her soft-shell crab po’boy, and I got one with crawfish. Both are on the cusp of their seasons, hers waning and mine waxing. Killing time while waiting for our order, I perused the plethora of spices, rubs, and seasonings. Sweet Heat For Your Meat stood out, mainly for its package art.

The food there is great, and it is apparently true about not being able to rush greatness, as it took nearly 30 minutes to get our to-go order. At the table in the Airbnb, if you listened carefully, you could hear us actually purring quietly while polishing those sandwiches off. Trouble is now she probably won’t stop talking about how good it was all the way back to Santa Fe.

Tonight’s meal is back at Adele’s with older brother Steve and his wife Janet. For our dessert, we were tasked with picking up a couple of slices of cake from The Cocoa Bean Bakery. Their cakes are beautiful to look at and delicious to eat. Their 9″ cakes feed up to 20 because of their height. Each slice is $4.25, so you do the math on the total cost of that cake. The woman behind the counter asked if we wanted them in two different boxes, and Sally replied, “Don’t bother; we’ll put it in the center of the table, and it’ll be four forks and a feeding frenzy.”

Those po’boys were worth the wait, and the cake was worth the cost.

Hammond – Day 14: Three & A Quarter Meals, Hundred Something Miles

Breakfast: Maybe five miles to go to get my usual morning latte.

Sally and I headed to her mom Adele’s house to pick her up.

World’s Largest Ronald Reagan Statue

Lunch: From Hammond I drove Sally and her mom 20 miles east from Hammond to Covington to have lunch with a couple of old friends from their days at Lakeview Presbyterian Church in New Orleans. I was invited to join them, but was also given the option not to, seeing as I didn’t know them, I opted out. I had something way more interesting to see in Covington, the World’s Largest Ronald Reagan Statue. Less than a 1/4 mile away from Mr. Reagan was a restaurant called Lola’s where I had lunch. I dined on a 1/2 Bostonian sandwich and a bowl of Corn & Crab Bisque. It also included a small side salad of mixed greens with a balsamic vinaigrette. Iced tea to wash it down.

We returned back to Adele’s house just briefly before heading out again.

Afternoon Interlude: We drove over to Adele’s friend Charlotte’s house, maybe 5 miles away, to trade her some (a lot really) plastic food containers that we brought back from Covington for some of her fresh-baked biscotti, which is a big draw for Sally when she’s in Hammond.

We returned back to Adele’s house just briefly before heading out, sans Adele.

Dinner: From Hammond I drove Sally and me 30 miles west of Hammond to Baton Rouge to have dinner with son Stuart and family for the 7-year-old granddaughter’s birthday. The birthday girl pick for our epicurean delight was Central Buffet. Stuart’s wife Christina’s parents were there too. We reintroduced ourselves because the last and only time we had met was twenty-three years ago at their daughter’s and Sally’s son’s wedding.

We returned home to our Airbnb stuffed to the gills, but already planning tomorrow evening’s big dinner with Adele, Sally’s big brother and his wife…