Road Trip

So Long La Casa de Sally

Last Night’s Santa Fe Sunset from Fort Marcy

After 7 days of hanging curtains, repairing several stools damaged in shipping, changing a few light bulbs & hunting for just the right bookcase for a certain wall, Donna and I are on our way home. Hunting bookcases took us into nearly every consignment and or thrift store in Santa Fe before we finally hit paydirt at a little, one-man operation in corner lot just about a mile from La Casa de Sally.

While in Santa Fe we also ate at two different Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives Restaurants, breakfast at the Tune-Up Cafe1 an lunch at Back Road Pizza.

Tonight we are in Flagstaff and the drive was mostly I-25 to I-40 with a couple of forays onto Old Route 66 for some geocaching and sight seeing. On the last bit, from outside Winslow to the hotel, we took a lovely back road for the last 61 miles. According Google maps this route was about 13 miles and 20 minutes longer, but the time might have actually been less than taking I-40 in. This is because unlike our last day driving into Santa Fe a week ago we were not caught by surprise with a construction slow down. Arizona had a sign a hundred miles from Flagstaff letting us know the road dropped to 1 lane from 2 at mile post 205, so we got off a long way from there and looped into our hotel. And right now looking out the Holiday Inn Express’s window we can see I-40 and traffic is creeping.

25,000 Cholla Plants

A small story from Thursday’s drive:

When we were getting ready to leave the small corner of Colorado we pass through, Donna was driving, so I asked, “Hey, if there is a big ol’ Welcome to New Mexico sign, pull over so I could take a picture?” I was looking at the GPS watching the the border approach and I could see on the left side of the road the back of the Welcome to Colorado sign, but I couldn’t see anything on the right. As we passed the spot there was a stone marker, about the size of a fairly decent headstone, that read “Boundary / Navajo Reservation / US Dept Interior.” I might have taken a picture, but by then it was too late…maybe next time.

Somewhere not too far into the Navajo Reservation the rental CX-5 passed the 25,000 mile mark.

New Mexico’s Capital City

La Casa de Sally

Door to door, from the Scenic View Inn in Moab to La Casa de Sally in Santa Fe, according to the Google Guy it is 378 miles and take six and a half hours. The mileage was probably about right, but the time was probably wrong. Not just because of our frequent stops and lunch break, but we ran into construction on US-84/285 just north of Santa Fe, where they were resurfacing the road and brought 3 lanes down into just one.

I took just three photos today, two out the passenger window (one of which is very blurry) and the above photo of the rental car at our home for the next week. They are a couple things to do around the house and we have a scenic train ride one day, but that is it for set plans. I’m sure we will probably do the touristy stuff and visit Old Town Santa Fe at least. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you updated here.

Mobbed Moab

Day 3 was our longest planned day on the road and from fill up in the morning to fill up in the afternoon we drove 385.2 miles. The first 60 miles was to finish up the rest of the loneliest road where it stops at the Nevada state line. At least that is what they would have you believe. Right at the Nevada/Utah line is a quickstop (Utah side) and casino (Nevada side) called Bordertown which is the last bit of services for 90 miles. That 90 Utah miles of US-50 is just as lonely as the 300 and something Nevada miles.

We spent a night in Moab on our last trip to Santa Fe in November and this time we are going to spend two nights. So instead of continuing on tomorrow morning as we did that time, we are going to spend the day going to Canyonlands National Park before moving on on Thursday. We have been through it neighbor park Arches, twice before (2009 & 2018), but have never visited Canyonlands before.

Not that Moab was a secret or anything before, but it is amazing just how crowded and built up it has become since that 2009 visit. There are reasons for that growth of course, the outdoor recreation in this bit of Utah are are as varied as they are plentiful, but still we both can’t help but wish that it was a little more like it was.

24,000 Miles of Nothing

Day 2 consisted of over 300 miles of driving on what Life Magazine dubbed the Loneliest Road in America back in 1986. The Nevada Department of Tourism has decided to run with that description and have turned it into a tourist “destination.”

Once you get west of Fallon there is pretty much of nothing along the whole way across the state. There are three whole named places along the route, two of which have populations of around 100 and are nothing more than glorified gas stops. We are spending the night in the third, Ely, a city of 4,000 that benefits from being a crossroads of 3 separate US routes, 6, 50 & 93.

This is a real pretty drive, but we probably won’t be picking it as our default route between Klamath Falls and Santa Fe any time soon. Speaking of time, for some reason my phone has already changed from Pacific Time to Mountain Time even though we are 40 miles as the crow flies to the Utah border where the change point is.

Somewhere around the middle of the loneliest road, literally in the middle of nowhere, the rental car rolled through its twenty fourth thousand mile.

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.

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.