Road Trip

Good Thing You Make K-Cups Dunkin

Back in Aiken I got addicted to Dunkin Donuts coffee. There were actually two in town and we would alternate going to one or the other for breakfasts a couple times a week. We invested in a Keurig and I bought K-cups and the Dunkin creamer/sweetener so I could enjoy a Dunkin coffee every dang day. So when we moved to Oregon, where there isn’t even one store, it really wasn’t a hardship because of the K-cup creamer combo. But every time we travel I always keep my eye open for a store to get a coffee made by someone else.

For this trip to Mississippi and back I checked for stores in every overnight town with plans to get a good ol’ medium hot Dunkin decaf with regular cream and sugar (regular in Dunkin speak means 3 sugars and 3 creamers.) My first chance came in Hobbs, NM and I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t go to it. Hey, I’m old and it was 2 weeks ago so if I didn’t write about it here it didn’t happen.

My first real Dunkin experience was 3 days ago in Killeen, TX. There was one just 4 miles from the hotel so Donna sent me on a trip to go get my coffee while she finished packing up all our crap. I rolled thru the drive in and got my usual order. Stopped and filled up the car with gas and when I got back to the hotel I took my first sip. They obviously didn’t understand the Dunkin phrase “regular” because it tasted like just 1 cream and 1 sugar. At the breakfast area in the hotel I added a couple of sugar packets, but couldn’t totally fix it because all they had was hazelnut cream.

Our next stop with a Dunkin was Odessa, Texas. We tried the same trick as last time in Killeen, I went off on my own with the Google Maps lady directing me. This one was a lot further than Killeen, but the route looked pretty simple, go 3 miles on the I-20 service road, turn right onto TX388 Loop, go three miles turn right off the loop, a quick left and then another quick left. When I took that second left I knew something was wrong because I was in an industrial area. When little Miss Google said you have reached your destination I was in a gravel lot of a small gray warehouse with absolutely no signage.

So I gave up and started back to the hotel. I couldn’t make a left to get back on the Loop, so I turned right and merged back on heading a 1/2 mile up to the next exit. The one really nice thing Texas has in these situations is a dedicated U-turn lane that doesn’t make you sit through several traffic lights to go right back in the opposite direction. I zipped around the U-turn lane and as I got pointed back towards the hotel on the entrance ramp what did I see in my rearview mirror but a big Pilot Truck Stop sign and a Dunkin sign right below it! At this point I was so frustrated that I watched those signs shrink in the distance as I kept going back to the hotel.

Leaving Odessa we were heading due north along US385 and as it turned out there was another Dunkin in the next town, Andrews just 30 miles away. It too was in a Pilot Truck Stop so as got to where it was located I pulled in and went inside and there wasn’t anything Dunkin related at all. When I walked outside all sad like, I notice that I had just gone into a Love’s Truck Stop. Doh! The Pilot was across the street. Donna suggested we walk, but I poo-poo’d it because of the 18-wheeled truck traffic we’d need to dodge. When I went inside Pilot the Dunkin was just a self-serve area with a couple large urns, a small cabinet with a few doughnuts and an extremely messy condiment area. I made a medium (not decaf) with what might have been creamer and some liquid sugar. It was OK, but barely worth the effort.

The next Dunkin was in Clovis, New Mexico and instead of waiting until morning Donna, suggested I get one when we arrived in town. Turns out it too was in a Pilot Truck Stop and because of that, I didn’t even think of trying it because our next stop was Santa Fe and I know they have a real store that I have been to on previous visits.

Santa Fe Fuego

We arrived at Casa de Sally in Santa Fe around lunch time after a shortish drive from Clovis, NM near the Texas border. We then spent the afternoon chatting until it came time to take ourselves out to the ballgame. We were off to Fort Marcy Park to see the Santa Fe Fuego play the Trinidad (CO) Triggers.

Because Sally has extra bedrooms (even with Donna and I there) she is hosting a couple ball players for the local independent minor league baseball team of the Pecos League. For housing these two players, she is compensated with 4 sets of season tickets for all 30 of their home games. The season just started and tonight was just the second home game and Sally has seen both of them. It is a fun night out, but I don’t think Sally will be there for all the other 28.

Four More Arrows In Our Quiver

Back ten days ago we passed up on looking for the Quanah Parker Arrow in Seminole, TX on our way east because of traffic. Well, today on our way west, we sought it out. The photos below came from there; the arrow, the plaque at the base (some have this, some don’t) and a shot of the arrow’s fletching through the sunroof.

The very next town 17 miles along the route, Seagraves, TX, also had an arrow located right outside the town’s museum. These next photos are from there; the arrow, a smaller replica inside and a portrait of Chief Quanah Parker himself on a wall inside by a local artist. We must have spent an hour inside the museum. It was a treasure trove of cool bits, it was almost being inside the dusty attics of the town and surrounding county folk’s homes. Military memorabilia from several past wars, high school band and dance team uniforms, school yearbooks, football team photos, random family photos (some marked, other not so much), school art projects and some really nice art from local artists.

Twenty miles further up the road was the town of Brownfield and Donna located an arrow outside the the county museum. We didn’t go inside here like we did in Seagraves. It was about lunch time so we found a local restaurant that served Cajun food and on the way there we spotted a second arrow in town. So after eating we doubled back to take a picture of it too.

Donna found another arrow in the town of Littlefield about 50 miles further north, but we never made it. About halfway up in the town of Levelland we could see the dark gray skies of a thunderstorm up ahead. After looking at the radar we opted to head west and kind of run through the storm width instead driving straight through the length of it. Maybe next time we should just wait that kind of storm out. The distance between Levelland and Morton is about 25 miles and it poured almost the entire way, sometimes the rain drops were hitting the car sounded like hail. Fortunately it wasn’t hail because if it was our crack in the windshield might have gotten a lot bigger. In Morton the rain slowed way down and we stopped a quick stop to get couple sodas and a snack before heading back out on the road.

This is where it got interesting. We were going to head straight north on TX214 towards Muleshoe, but at the north end of town there was a raging river across the highway. We stopped and watched several large vehicles crash through the running water and decided the Mini would never make it. Our next option was to go due west on TX114 and turn north on TX596. We got a mile down 596 before having to turn around because of high water on the road. U-turn back to TX 144 and continue west towards New Mexico. Three miles or so down that road and this time there was a small lake over the road, so we back tracked to Morton. The river across the road north was still raging. We couldn’t go back east because that meant driving back through the storm so our only option was to try going south. This time we got lucky.

Seven miles south of Morton on TX214 we came to TX125 heading west and pulled over for a second to formulate a plan. About that time an 18-wheel tanker truck passed by going west, I pulled out and followed. By this time it was just sprinkling, so I stayed back a hundred yards or so and watched for him to hit the water first. And as it turned out there were only a few places that had enough water on the side of the road to make us move over to get by. About halfway to the New Mexico border the truck pulled into an oil field so we were on our own, that was fine because by that time and place, the road the rest of the way to Clovis was mostly dry.

35,000 Oil Wells

There is a reason we picked this particular spot to stop along the way west, it is home to Donna’s older brother Steve. We had dinner with him at the local Cracker Barrel. The last time we saw him was when we were headed to Lake Tahoe for a niece’s wedding back in 2018.

We started the day in Killeen and ended in Odessa. The title of todays posts went from 35,000 Black-eyed Susans along the roadsides of the hill country to 35,000 wind turbines the further west we went and ended it up what you see above when we entered the Permian Basin. There were no real Roadside America goals today, but we did stumble on a couple of things right here in Odessa. An even bigger long horn skull than we found in Albany, TX a week ago on our way east and a Stonehenge replica on the campus of the University of Texas Permian Basin.

About 100 miles west of Killeen the Mini eased past the 35,000 mile mark.

Fort Johnson?

We probably didn’t start out today’s drive from Hammond on the planned route from last night, but eventually we did meet up with it towards the end somewhere as there aren’t that many ways to get there from southeast Louisiana. As it turned out, a bit of today’s route was a repeat of some of our Moss Motoring Challenge trip roads of 2014. We even ate lunch at the same spot we did a little over 9 years ago, Lea’s Lunchroom in LeCompte.

We did manage to get to one point of interest from Roadside America though. The small cemetery next to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Moreauville had, among the usual above ground crypts and mausoleums, a tall black crucifix with an unusual plague at its base that reads “…disappeared Nov. 23, 1953, Intercepting a UFO over Canadian Border…”

Tonight’s stop is in Leesville, Louisiana just outside the gates of a large Army installation called Fort Polk which is named named after a Confederate general from the Civil War, Leonidas Polk. At least for the next week or two when it will be renamed Fort Johnson in honor of Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a North Carolina native who served in the Army during World War I and earned an African American Medal of Honor.

Route Change


One last Laurel photo…

We were supposed to stay here another day, but a opportunity to visit with a couple of folks who live on the “North Shore”, which is what the people here in these parts call anything on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, so we bailed on our stay to head south.

First up was another trip to Mandeville for café au lait and beignets with a friend. Halfway down I-59 south we got a text that she couldn’t make it because of a prior arrangement she forgot about. Not a problem we were still going to the Café Du Monde for treats, but we changed the location to Covington instead of Mandeville because it was more on our way to the second rendezvous in Hammond. This is where we visited with the mother of Sally, who we on our way to see in Santa Fe, and a second Mom to Donna when she was living in New Orleans back in the 60s & 70s.

So now, tomorrow instead of going from Laurel, MS to Leesville, LA we are driving from Hammond, LA to Leesville. Before we were going to be heading due west on US84 for most of it, but now we have to go west northwest and there are a lot of rivers (including the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya), bayous and swampy areas that preclude an easy direct route. This afternoon we created a convoluted route and we are hopeful of being able stay on it tomorrow.

Side Road Trip

This morning we took a little side trip to a place we spent three years at, about 40 years ago, Meridian, Mississippi. After returning from Guam and a 6-month bit of schooling in Tennessee, I was assigned to NAS Meridian. Donna worked on her college degree while I worked at the Navy base. We found an apartment in a complex on the north side of town that allowed her to go the college without having to deal with downtown and I could head due north to the Navy base. Believe it or not, but that apartment complex is still there and going strong. We drove through the loop and while it did look familiar neither one of us could pick out the building we lived in.

We visited the campus where Donna went to school, but it wasn’t totally recognizable. We also drove a part of the route from the apartment complex to the Navy base that I drove and would sometimes bicycle ride to (Donna would often ride halfway and return back home.) We drove some through downtown and it was almost completely unfamiliar. We stumbled onto the US Government complex building and took the above photo because it included the Post Office. It is amazing how much detail is lost after 40 years, including neither of us remembering just how hilly the terrain was there.

On the way from Laurel to Meridian we drove up on US11. Which in a fit of madness and youth we once rode our bikes on (loaded with a pup tent, 2 sleeping bags and a white gas stove) as part of a 4 day trip to her Mom’s house in New Orleans. We didn’t expect to be able pick out anything we’d remember, because we would have been traveling at 1/5 the speed we were driving and because pretty much any two-lane backroad through southern Mississippi looks the same.

About three quarters of the way to Meridian, Donna noticed a sign for a Confederate Cemetery as we whizzed by. So we u-turned and went back to check it out. We drove into a cemetery, but it seemed a bit too recent when I noticed, just across some railroad tracks the familiar sight of small white marble headstone in neat rows. So we went over to the right place. Even if their cause was misguided, on this Memorial Day weekend it is still important to remember those that gave their all.

Even if this little side trip didn’t bring distinct memories back it was nice way to spend a morning. We got back to Laurel and had lunch at an actual local restaurant. We have mostly eaten at the VRBO or at southern chain type places we remember fondly from our South Carolina days, but we can highly recommend the Texas Pitmaster BBQ if you are ever here.