Road Trip

Another Visit To Cortez

80′ Tall Robot in front of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe

This is the third or possibly the fourth time I’ve been in Cortez, CO, as it is on the route that Donna and I would occasionally use to drive to visit Santa Fe Sally. The first ever one didn’t involve Sally at all. It did involve a stop in Santa Fe before she lived there; it happened to be along the route of a giant road trip in 2009 that stretched from Devils Tower, Wyoming, to the Saguaro National Park in Tucson, AZ.

On this trip, with Sally subbing for Donna, we are overnighting here before heading to visit the iconic Monument Valley. We will be spending two nights on the actual site in a nice hotel right on the grounds. This will be Sally’s first visit and my third. I was here with Donna in 1989 when we road-tripped around the state of Arizona and by myself earlier this year on the start of the 2025 Jumbo Road Trip.

If you ever find yourself in Cortez and hungry, I can’t recommend The Farm Bistro enough.

A Quiet Corner Of The Loudest State

K Falls Morning


 
Started the morning in Klamath Falls and ended the day in Reno. From Klamath to the California border is 25 miles, and from Reno to the border is 20 miles, leaving a little over 200 miles of the quietest part of California to drive through. Most of the “towns” you pass through on this route have just double-digit populations. The largest town on the drive is Susanville, with a population of 12,000, but on the route I took I never went through it.

Change Of Plans

I was supposed to fly from Portland to Las Vegas on Tuesday morning, but with the government shutdown and its effect on air travel, I’m now driving to Las Vegas.

The Flying Pig

Tonight I’m in Klamath Falls at my usual spot, the Shilo Inn, a stone’s throw from my second favorite coffee shop, Brevada Brewhouse. Because it was 1:00pm when I got there, it felt weird to order a mixed smoothie bowl, something I’ve always gotten at breakfast, so I ordered a sandwich instead. I did order my usual medium caramel latte though; those are timeless.

Because tonight is the time change, before I left home I set all the clocks back an hour, so I wouldn’t have to worry about that when I get back.

Mileage Matters

Off-Road?

Day before yesterday was the one-year anniversary of owning the new Miata. Yesterday the car rolled past 19,000 miles on the odometer. This almost got close to the 22,000 miles I put on the first Miata thirty-five years ago. If I hadn’t taken the 10,500-mile Jumbo Road Trip the new car would have been under the total miles you can use on a low-mileage lease.

Only 500 of those twenty-two thousand miles back in 1989-90 were because of one road trip to New Orleans. The rest were mostly because I think I drove it every day on my lunch hour, for that whole hour. I just wandered the backroads nearby to the plant. One of the engineers noticed what I was doing every day and said to me once, “I know where you’re going.” “You are driving through downtown so you can see your reflection in the shop windows.” He was way off; I rarely went near downtown on the drives; mine were more therapeutic in nature. He meant it as a joke, so I applauded him for that.

Sdrawkcab Og Ew

Buckey at Brevada

We’ll start with the last one I took. I ostensibly came to Klamath Falls for that Smoothie Bowl from Brevada tomorrow morning, but I also wanted my route to take me through Crater Lake National Park so I could take a picture of their post office. That is the next one in reverse order.

Crater Lake – I was lucky to get this close to the building that houses the park’s post office. The National Park was hopping on a summer Sunday. (8/24/25)

While I was in the park, I stopped at a couple of overlooks and a couple of visitor centers. I bought a couple of postcards and a sticker for Buckey’s trunk lid. At my last stop the morning mist and smoke that had obscured the lake was starting to burn off, but for the first couple of photos you had to imagine that deep blue the lake is famous for.

Before I left to head south, I captured the last post office in Eugene. Then I had breakfast right next door to the last of the three post offices left hanging out there on OR-126 on a ninety-mile out and back.

Sdrawkcab Og Ew is We Go Backwards backwards.

Sunday Fun Day

Yesterday was a longer day, 300 miles and 8 post offices compared to today’s 240 miles and 6 post offices. But it sort of evened out because Saturday eastbound on I-84 was nicer than today’s westerly trip home. Although, if I could have swapped the order of I-84 and OR-74 which would have made the day finish up with some nearly zero traffic twisting and bobbing roads, today would have been a great drive.

This weekend’s haul took my post office tally to 252 out of the 390 total or about 65% done. There are around 90 or so left that are densely packed along the coast and the southern portion of I-5. The remaining 40-ish out east are widely scattered and will need several more long drives with more than just one overnight stay for each trip.

Dualling Shovels

I feel a little cheated, don’t they fact check over there at the Roadside America HQ? Back in May on the way back from Hammond with Santa Fe Sally I made us stop just outside of Wichita Falls, TX to take a photo of the Largest Shovel in Texas at 15 feet high. In the blog post about it I said, “… someone will take that as a challenge and make one 25′ tall somewhere else in the state.”

I have been pre-planning another jaunt with Sally for later this year. Today I was looking for a different route across the great state of Texas to go between Santa Fe and Hammond. We did it last time with a single overnight stop in Bowie, TX, and we’d would like to do that again, but I’d like a different path to mix it up. So I started dragging the blue line on Google Maps around and came up with something promising that loops south of Dallas.

The next thing I look for is hotels at the overnight spot, some small towns in the middle of nowhere don’t have many places we’d stay in, we have some standards, you know. Off I went to Roadside America to see if there is something weird that would hopefully be near a driver’s change spot. I opened the Texas map and zoomed into an area where I thought we would be and saw something labeled World’s Largest Shovel. Wait a minute, I thought I’d been to the largest shovel in Texas? I had, but it was only the tallest one until this beast was created in 2020.