Road Trip

Santa Fe, NM – Day 4: No Data?

Started on the final leg to Santa Fe at around 7:30 AM. Because I have been heading mostly southeast, I have been driving into the sun the last few mornings. Today I should have started an hour earlier or later because US-160 is pretty much straight east out of Kayenta. Fortunately for me the sun was just high enough that the sun visor worked if I sat up real straight, it would block it.

The first stop of the day was in Farmington to get the Roadside America picture of the day, Sunny the Big Man (Muffler Man. I knew he was on a Main drag in town, but not which one, so I fired up Google Maps to direct me the last few turns. I didn’t have service, no map. Because I was listening to MP3s off the phone I didn’t realize it, but somewhere after the end of driving day yesterday I had turned off Mobile Data on the phone. Ooops.

Out of Farmington I hooked up with US-550 South and if Miss Google had her way, I would follow that to Bernalillo and then go 40 miles north on I-25 to Santa Fe. I would have none of that, just north of the town of Cuba I hung a left onto NM-96 which is a rural windy road with beautiful southwest scenery and it only cost me an estimated 7 extra minutes.

Not long after NM-96 ends at US-84 there is a town called Abiquiu that is home to the Big Pink Flamingo and Georgia O’Keefe’s home. I also had lunch in Abiquiu at the Inn there. Beef and Potato Soup with a big hint of Green Chili. The 50 miles of NM-96 and that lunch in that setting were enough to make the last 3-1/2 days and 1,500 miles worth it.

Kayenta, AZ – Day 3: “Tse Bii” Ndzisgaii

The Mittens in Monument Valley


 
It has been a long day and I’m beat. I stopped to get three different Roadside America pictures, two of which made the cut. See below or on Instagram. The biggest item of the day was the above picture, the Mittens in Monument Valley. I stopped in and had to wrangle a single seat on a tour. I tried to reserve online, but there was zero options available for a single, it started at 2 and went up. I can sort of get the reason, its like a cruise ship, all there cabins are for two and these tour vehicles seat twelve. But what happens if you get a family of three?

Anyway, I did get on a tour and there was an empty seat beside me. I thought I was getting a 2-hour tour, but as it turned out it was a 2-1/2 hour tour, which in the end, ended up being 3 hours long. At the finish I was bounced, shaken, stirred, slightly sunburned, very wind blown with sand in my shoes and dirt in my nostrils. The guide was great, informative and entertaining. Because it is a guided tour we also got to go places and see things the peasant don’t on their $8 a head self-guided 2-hour loop.

Tomorrow I get to Santa Fe where I can wash some clothes and the dead bugs off the Miata.

Price, UT – Day 2: Plastic Eggs For Breakfast

Texaco Big Friend – Service Station Man

Day #2 Roadside America Pic: Texaco Big Friend – Service Station Man in Springville, UT at a very large Motorcycle Shop that included a Motorcycle Museum and a Motorcycle themed restaurant. Note the puny human on the left for scale.

I got out the door of the hotel at around 6:00 but didn’t hit the Interstate ’til later. Part of the time lost was getting a latte at The Human Bean and then breakfast at a Jack in the Box. When I went back up front to get some napkins the Shift Leader was placing little plastic eggs all around. I looked at her quizzically and she said that none of the people that worked there had never seen this particular Easter tradition. She was the only one I interacted with, so I have no idea why someone had never had an Easter Egg Hunt and I didn’t ask.

Easter Egg Hunt at Jack’s

Boise, ID – Day 1: Oregon Trail In Reverse

The above image of the World’s Largest Map of the Oregon Trail is from Baker City and is the first of many (I hope) Roadside America pictures from this trip. I’ll try and find one on each day I’m travelling. We’ll see how that works out.

I got a 7:30 start and ended up at the hotel in Boise 5:30, but that is Mountain Time, so it was 4:30 on my internal clock. Google says I should have taken 6-1/2 hours to do it, but all my wandering and break taking made it a 9 hour trip. First off I managed to shoehorn in 4 Post Office pictures, a leisurely lunch in Le Grand of pizza slices and salad, a gas stop and literal walk in the park in Baker City. I also didn’t help that I tried to dodge Friday rush hour in Boise by taking some surface streets that really just delayed the inevitable loss of time.

Solo Post Office Sunday

I got up early and went downstairs at the Shilo Inn for breakfast and boy what a disappointment. The only thing I got was small pre-packaged container of Honey Nut Cheerios and an 8oz container of 2% milk. I went back to the room and ate. I wanted to get this hanging Post Office in New Pine Creek (see above photo) so I drove the 112 miles one way to get it. I stopped in Lakeview on the way back to get something really worth eating.

When I arrived back to the hotel around noon, it was just in time to watch the Red Sox lose their game against the Texas Rangers. Boston won the first game of the series last Thursday, but promptly lost the next three to Texas, so their 2025 W/L record so far is 1-3.

Also, when I got back to the hotel, I wasn’t hungry for lunch because of the homemade biscuit with egg, sausage & cheese I had at The Bottom of the Barrel Bakery was twice the size of a normal Carl’s Jr biscuit. I figured I’d get back on track with a good dinner. Never happened.

When I checked the weather for the day in Klamath Falls it mentioned that there might be some snow in the early morning hours of Monday. Hmmm, there wasn’t any mention of snow earlier in the week. Around three this afternoon I looked again, now they were saying an inch or more of accumulation at lower altitudes, but there might be several inches above 5,000 feet. That would be a problem, any route I would take from Klamath Falls to home would include at least one pass that was higher than five thousand. I was willing to stay another day, but changed my mind when snow was forecast for the next 3 days.

I stuffed all my things back into their respective bags, checked out of the hotel, threw the bags in the trunk and headed north. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. At about 5:30 I would normally be thinking about getting din-din, but by then I was long past civilization. I kept thinking I’d see something I wanted in those small towns on this side of the Cascades, but didn’t. I got on I-5 just south of Eugene and really didn’t want to get right back off, so I was going to wait until I got north of town. Then with all the traffic I missed the only exit that had food listed on the sign. I had to stop and gas in Salem and by that time it quarter after seven and too late to eat a meal. I ate the second bag of a half apple I had brought along for afternoon snack.

I figure between the Lakeview round trip and the dash home I drove over 500 miles for the day. With Saturday’s 300-ish mile drive down to K-Falls it was certainly good practice for my upcoming Jumbo Road Trip.

Sunday In The Rain

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky

I did go for a drive in Bucky and did photograph nine more post offices in spite of the rain, occasionally heavy. Trouble is I only took eight of the ones I thought I would, but by luck got one more. I can’t trust a saved Google Map that has multiple stops in it. The Google to Samsung transfer hiccups and you end up with just the Start and End points. Which is really wonderful if the start and end were the same place. Also, you can’t start driving before you hit drive button on the map, because it will keep shouting at you to do a U-turn to go back to the starting point first and sometimes with this it’ll drop all the stops too.

Because I made all the Oregon post offices as a Saved Place, they show as dots on the map and I can hop from dot to dot on a loop. The problem of my missing one on the loop today was because in Hillsboro, the regular post office and the DCU1 were about a 1/4 mile apart and their dots kind of overlapped. I didn’t notice the miss until I was home and removing the photographed post offices from my saved places list.

Lucky, number nine was because there was one post office on the way home that would made an out of the way detour next time I came this way. It was in the small town of St. Paul, between OR99W and I-5. Below are today’s outtakes, AKA non post office photos.

Saturday At The Coast

Well, I did drive over to the Oregon coast today, but more time was spent getting there and back than on the coast. I drove a total of 285 miles and only about 30 of it was along US101. I did pretty much used a whole tank of gas on the day. There were a few walks in state parks, the Indian Beach Trail in Ecola State Park, to the beach at Sunset Beach State Recreation Site and climbing around defensive batteries at Fort Stevens State Park. I set out to clean up all the unvisited Post Offices in the upper left part of the state and it took pictures of a dozen of them to do it. Here are the non post office photos, those you’ll get tomorrow, maybe.

If I go for a drive tomorrow I can get nine more in about a 125 miles, or less than a half a tank of gas… And if I do, I’ll take Bucky. When I got home today the new beige seatbelts were at my doorstep instead of the expected Monday arrival. So after a 10 hour trip, I spent 2 hours in the driveway installing them.