Road Trip

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.

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 Cafe2 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.