Road Trip

Return Trip

After grabbing four Post Offices on the way up to Washington, on the way home we took photos of seven. This pretty much takes care of all of the possible post offices along US97 in the state. There are only two left, our hometown P.O. and one 70 miles north of us in Chemult. Klamath Falls we can do anytime and we would have done Chemult on the way home as well, but when Donna asked, I said we already had it. Ooops.

46,000 Fruit Trees

Another 280 mile day consisting of The Dalles, OR to Monroe, WA and another day of more traffic than expected in a few spots. Don’t ask me about Sultan, WA…

We did manage to take a very pleasant and fun road from Yakima to Ellensburg. WA-821 runs right along the river through a canyon filled with 24 miles of sweeper turns and beautiful scenery.

If you have a hankering for Italian food you definitely can’t go wrong at the Ellensburg Pasta Company.

Just south of Yakima, while driving through thousands of apple and cherry trees the LadyBug ticked past its forty-six thousandth mile.

Small Road Trip

Off to the Great State of Washington. We are heading to the World Famous 4th of July Picnic of Les & Joanie Gilbert, something we haven’t been to for the past 5 years. Today’s leg was around 280 miles and for the first 100 and the last 80 of those miles it was smooth sailing, but the middle section from south of Bend to where US197 splits off was crowded, slow and quite a contrast to the end segments.

We did stop in downtown Bend for lunch and had a great meal at a place called The Point. We split an order of beer battered fish. But the real highlight was something that Donna saw on a chalk board inside, Fried Apples. It might have been advertised as a desert but we had it as an appetizer. The half dozen slices tasted like a sublime fried apple pie and were served with a caramel dipping sauce and some whipped cream.

For the fun of it and to break up the drive we snagged 3 Post Office photos. There were a couple more we were close to, but on a Friday their parking lots were too full to even find a spot to park in so that I could get car and Post Office in the same frame. We may try and stop at a couple few on the way home next Tuesday.

Just Another Road Trip Wrap Up

For this last road trip we stated on a Sunday and finished two Sundays later for a total of fifteen days. Of that, seven days were driving, one full day spent in Moab and the other seven were in Santa Fe.

Like our last trip we rented a “car1“, a 2021 Mazda CX-5. Unlike last time though it was by choice because this time the Mini didn’t have any issues preventing its use. That last trip we had a Mitsubishi Outlander Sport and the CX-5, because it is a Mazda product, was a lot more engaging to drive.

For the seven non La Casa de Sally overnights, four of them were at a Holiday Inn Express, the other three were independents. The least expensive was in the independent in Beatty, NV at a few cents over a hundred bucks and it was what it was worth. The most expensive was the other non HIE in Moab and at a few bucks under two hundred dollars it was definitely not worth it, but it was $60 cheaper than the Holiday Inn Express in town, so there’s that.

We bought gas eleven times. The cheapest we paid for gas, not counting the final fill up in Klamath Falls because we got 80¢ off from points, was $4.17 a little west of Albuquerque. The most expensive was in just outside Las Vegas at $5.56 a gallon. We used 103 gallons to go a total of 3,120 miles for an average MPG of 30.4, even though the trip info on the CX-5 said it 32.6. This MPH compares nicely to that Mitsubishi’s number of 30.5 MPG, especially considering how often my foot was into that turbo 🙂 .

Back Home

We got back home from Santa Fe at about 1:00pm and then proceeded to take the next four hours or so unpacking, doing laundry and getting a bit of grocery shopping done. All that and still watch the final round of the Masters.

I usually leave the desktop PC on all the time, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to give it a 2 week vacation while we were on ours. When I went to turn the HP Pavilion 590 back on, it just wouldn’t do anything. Tried to start it by holding down the power button for 15 to seconds before letting go, but that didn’t work. So I tried a trick that has worked in the past on computers, maybe even this one, unplug the power cord, hold down the power button while replugging in the cord. Didn’t work. Is it the power supply? The power switch itself? The motherboard? Or the little bitty board the switch plugs into? Where have the days gone where the switch was just a switch?

Our new Dell Inspiron Desktop 3891 by Tuesday.

26,000 Square Miles Of Desert

Geocaching in the Desert

Last November when we stopped in Beatty, Nevada for the night we stayed at the Motel 6 and we were very unhappy, so this time we booked a room in the Death Valley Inn and RV Park. It is pretty much a standard motel accommodation, but it was leaps and bounds above the Motel 6.

Side Note: Turns out we have been pronouncing the name of the town of Beatty wrong. We have always pronounced it like it looks, ‘beat-e’. We had stopped at a quick mart just north of Las Vegas and while Donna was chatting with a tribal police officer outside the store waiting for me to fill up he pronounced it ‘bait-e’. Later, when we checked in at the Death Valley Inn, I asked the clerk how the town name was pronounced and he confirmed it, ‘bait-e’.

Also, the last time we were here, we ate at Mel’s Diner for breakfast and we weren’t very happy with it either. So this time we tried the Denny’s inside the Stagecoach Hotel & Casino. While this is pretty much a standard Denny’s, the food was leaps and bounds above Mel’s Diner. The big problem with this place is that you had to walk quite a distance through a casino that still allowed smoking and it smelt it.

Side Note: When we ate at Mel’s back in 2018 and it was run by a kindly old man and the food was great, but by last November a different younger couple had bought him out and their food was below average.

Today’s drive was similar to the Loneliest Road in America, AKA US-50, in that it is 300 miles of empty desert with a couple of 100 mile stretches where there is no place to get gas. It was very dissimilar in that there was copious traffic in both directions, including about 25% of it being 18-wheelers that needed passing.

We had a couple of geocaching travel bugs that needed moving along, so I picked out a few caches with regular sized containers to find, and it didn’t take long to drop one of them. We stopped at the first cache only 40 miles north of Beatty.

The photo above is of the CX-5 from that cache that was about a 100 yards off the road. That CX-5 had just passed the 26,000 mile mark 32 miles back.

Last Time

Nevada Desert

This morning’s breakfast was at Mike and Rondas The Place, which we ate at the last time we were in Flagstaff in November of 2021. We were very pleased with that meal, but this time not so much. It was the eastside location of the restaurant that we ate at then and I don’t know if it was just this downtown location or what, but this time the food was bland and turned cold before we finished eating it. We have vowed that this was the last time we eat at Mike & Rhonda’s.

This might be an easy vow not to break because of Las Vegas. In November when we traveled this route back home we got into heavy traffic on I-515 into downtown and it was a major pain. So, this time I thought that maybe if we got on I-215 which looped around the west of the city it would be better even if it was a dozen miles longer. Ha, not so much, and it might have been worse. We have vowed not to come this way at all ever again. From now on when we make this trip we will just drive home the way we came via the Loneliest Road.

The shift to this ‘there and back on the same route’ plan was also enhanced by the negatives of having to drive in through downtown Albuquerque in the morning to catch I-40 west. Plus I-40 presents its own negatives as well, what with the shear amount of truck traffic that uses this cross country highway and the rough road surface cause by all these heavy vehicles.

On the plus side of the Klamath Falls to Carson City to Ely to Moab to Santa Fe route is it will give us an opportunity, on one of the legs, to visit the lower portion of Canyonlands National Park. Come back in November of this year and see how we do.