A back entry of travels…
South Lake Tahoe -> Ely
We drove out on US 50 and were literally the only ones on the road for 45 minute stretches at a time. That highway doesn’t see much use, eh? We pulled over when we did find a few cars stopped by the side of the road just past Fallon (home of the Fallon Naval Air Station) and noticed they were watching the sky with binoculars. Looking at the map, we noticed the highway runs through the US Naval Reservation Target Area and sure enough a gigantic black plume of smoke was erupting from the hillside and six jets and a mid-sized fixed wing plane were zipping around us. We waited for a second bombing, but they were intent on flying in formations, instead. As the traffic dissipated down to nothing again, we were confronted by a pioneer wagon and horses coming at us with a sign on the side about some sort of pioneer route they were following. Our country is full of very strange people.
Wildlife Spotting: A few antelope, quite at home on the range.
Ely->Green River
We stayed at the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall in Ely, which came complete with a set of Harley Davidson Baby Boomer Bikers checking in with queries about the bordellos down the street. The receptionist assured them that they were within easy walking distance, and since they probably won’t be sleeping for days, may as well head right on over there. Folks in these parts were looking, um, a tad rough around the edges, but they were enjoying smoking and beer drinking at 9AM as we were checking out. Everyone looked happy in a Nevadan sort of way, which is to say, they would have rather lived back in the days of the dusty streets and cowboys of yore. We’d stayed out the night before over at Mr. G’s Maggie’s bar and listened to a local group play some music while inhaling way too much second hand smoke and wondering if the old gentleman that tipped over smack dab in the middle of the bar’s empty dance floor was going to be able to crawl back up or not. I tell you, Ely is a class act of a town. Heading back out of town, we forgot how much we dislike greasy egg breakfasts and ended up ordering a gigantic Chorizo Egg Scramble. What on earth were we thinking? We considered the roadkill set of folks next to us ordering pie for breakfast may have committed a lesser health crime.
Ely -> Green River
More of US 50 and more empty roads. We considered that Utah is still a strange place, after stopping off for pizza at a local restaurant that was decorated with mismatched tiny floral prints, and finally reaching Green River and being overwhelmed by the same style wallpapers and tons of pale pink stuffed furniture. It is a distinct decorating style and quite far away from the rough and tumble Nevadan cowboy aura. Gads, yuck. We found the UNC-Duke game on (without sound, bah) over at Ray’s Tavern (pretty much the only place to eat in town other than the fast food row, and packed with motorcross riders). We were fine with our overcooked pork chop and veggie burger until the guy next to us found the remote and started channel surfing. We bailed and ended up watching the game in the Utah-esc hotel of plastic plants and pink furniture. UNC won, so it was a fine end to a very long day of driving.
Green River->Vail
Another long drive past Arches National Park and onto Vail. Not much excitement, but we found that the snow storm that we thought we were chasing had evaporated into warm sunny days. We skied a few days on some (whew) free tickets. (Vail is now going for an ungodly $92/ticket these days. Go figure.) The snow was the standard spring crunchy/sunny stuff, but the ‘big snow storm’ turned one day into a foggy/overcast, no precipitation, sort of day. With the normal Vail restaurant scene reaction: “Whoa, that was an expensive sandwich.”, we shuddered, apologized to our wallets and dined at Zazza Za! in Avon for some semi-adequate Naple’s stye pizza, Garfinkel’s for some fish tacos and to watch the skiers come in from the foggy afternoon and, well, the Swiss Chalet for some fine overpriced Swiss raclette. Staying at the Evergeen Lodge was a good deal, though, a slightly dumpy, but not too dumpy, place on the ski bus line.
Wildlife Spotting: A Big Horn Sheep under a bridge near Glenwood Springs
Vail-> Boulder
We swung by Idaho Springs for some Beau-Jo’s pizza. They serve a ‘mountain pie’ pizza with a large rolled edge crust with honey on the table, so you end up with both pizza and dessert with a single order. They’ve removed most of the paper napkin drawings that used to cover the restaurant walls, but it is still a charming place. From there, we headed over to Celestial Seasonings for a tea packing tour. They have a mint storage room that they open up on the tour, and within seconds you’ll be lightheaded and after a few minutes your eyes will be tearing. Nice. Their peppermints and spearmints were the one item solely grown in the U.S., from the Pacific Northwest, in fact. While in Boulder we managed to fit in our 90,000 mile Toyota service and find some decent Thai and Vietnamese food. With that rejuvenation for the car and us, we were ready to go.
Wildlife Spotting: The prairie dogs whistling in the Celestial Seasoning’s prairie dog field.
Boulder->Denver
We headed over to Golden to take the Coor’s Brewery tour, finally. It is amazing how you can live in a city for a few years but never actually go to any of the nearby tourist’s sites, eh? Well, now, I have seen how they make that horrible beer, not even their Killian’s Red is good. The fine part of the tour was the smell of malt in the air, though. The place was permeated by that rich, sugary wort smell. It made us want to either brew beer or cook molasses spice cookies. Pilsner, though, what a waste. It was St. Paddy’s Day (oh, not really… just that Denver couldn’t face the fact that St. Paddy’s was on a Monday, so they moved their downtown festival to the weekend). We rolled into Denver in the early afternoon as the beginning of the mass exodus of the ‘Green People’ were exiting the ever so Irish street fair. It was an amusing sight. Folks were sporting such witty t-shirts, such as: “The leprechauns make me do it.” and “Wish on me lucky charms.” with many sporting green face paint. We decided to get more green watching in at the Wyncoop. And though, despite the abundance of green people, the food and beer were really disappointing. It’s been 10 years since I’ve been there, but the great food that I remembered didn’t get anywhere near our table. And, heck, they took out the pinball machines upstairs. Nothing like a round of playing a round of pinball on a very green Attack From Mars machine… oh, the disappoint.
Denver -> Pagosa Springs
On the way out town, I couldn’t convince Derrell (or myself for that matter) to actually get the nerve up to check out the Colorado Springs mega-evangelical church of Ted Haggard fame. You know, Ted Haggard, that political pastor that had a bit of a gay prostitute problem while really liking meth? Nice guy, we read that he was reformed and no longer gay. All thoughts of getting speedball crazy high and dreaming of men, gone, completely back to his family ways. Anyhow, it was Sunday, and Colorado Springs was close, but we’d feel too creepy if we entered that 10,000 person congregation. Instead, we drove U.S. 285 through the mountains and ran into some oddly difficult driving conditions for a short stretch. The sun was shining (no snow for us, of course) and the snow by the roadside was melting fast. This was causing water to wash over the highway and steam off the warm asphalt thus turning into a heavy dense fog that was only along the ribbon of highway and nowhere else. It was a peculiar sight and at times slowed us down to a speedy 15 miles per hour. We found the town of Pagosa Springs had grown since we last saw it and contemplated that Wolf Creek ski area was looking good. Unfortunately by the time we checked into Pagosa Springs, we lost skiing ambition with the super warm temperatures. We did find the tiny Pagosa Brewing Company, which since it was Monday, and actually was St. Patrick’s Day, was celebrating on the correct day with just about every local in town crammed in the one room bar for a post parade get together. Now, unlike the current brewers at the Wynkoop, Tony Simmons can brew fantastic beer and he has a kick ass chef doing some serious pub grub from the small red cart out in the garden. We enjoyed our evening chatting with him and his European story of how he got around to making beer and setting up his less than two year old business. Sweet!
Pagosa Springs->Santa Fe
Well, being close to Durango, we had to see what the housing boom had done to the town. It wasn’t too bad, but they did have an overabundance of new strip malls along the highways. One of these newly built areas did deliver, though. We were ready for lunch and spotted a parking lot full of huge pickup trucks and a line of people out the door at a fine establishment called ‘Serious Texas Bar-b-que’. OMG, was that pulled pork good. That place was well worth the wait and those Texans were smokin’. It made up for all the past week’s mediocre food and then some. We had a great drive to Santa Fe, thanks to the Garmin Nüvi and managed to get a number of back roads in through the New Mexico pine forest. It was a thoroughly gorgeous drive and came complete with every cowboy’ed hatted pickup truck driver giving us a wave as we drove past. Now, that’s some small town living. Upon arriving in Santa Fe, we found comfortable spot at Garett’s Desert Inn within walking distance of the plaza and immediately met a pair of Baby Boomers from Northern Minnesota walking around in shorts and complaining that is was really cold (probably near 62 degrees out at that time). We were completely confused by them having just come from the snowy mountains that morning, but later saw that the forecast for Santa Fe was going to hit the mid-70’s by the end of the week. Ah, spring.
Santa Fe->Albuquerque
We walked the Old Town’s trinket shops and observed the tourist buses with loads of white haired old people and yet again found the area not to our liking. The Seasons cafe overlooking the Old Town is about as close as one needs to get to the touristas. We got a good morning of history in at the Art and History museum. The General Beale and his Southwest Camel Corps must have quite a sight in 1857. Camels, it seems, were perfect for desert and mountain travel, but they have a few bad traits. One is that with bad tempers, they can spit the entire contents of their stomach at you (with accuracy), and, well, if you could get past that, the strong stench would cause horses downwind to bolt. I just read in a Montana magazine that Nevada had enough camels that the state passed a law forbidding you to let your camels run at large on public roads. A strange world to contemplate before the steam trains and autos took over the continent.
Albuquerque->Gallup
Following a large piece of Route 66 and setting the Nüvi to map out a route off-highway, we had a Nüvi failure. Our road turned to dirt, then to a bumpy trail and finally stranded us at a culvert crossing full of water trying to take us under the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad line. In 4-wheel drive we backtracked our way out of that routing. We settled back onto paved roads and visited Bandara’s volcano crater and Ice Cave. This was a privately owned Ice Cave and not much of a stop, but it was great to get out of the car and do some walking. After that, down the road past many a speed trap and through one DUI checkpoint (Easter was in full swing in New Mexico), then over to El Morro National Monument to check out the graffiti of over 2,000 signatures left near the watering hole. And of course, our new found Camel hero, General Beale had his signature carved there, as well as some dudes taking over the continent for Mexico City back in the 1600’s.
Wildlife Spotting: Coyotes out and about for the day. We ended our day in Gallup at the Historic El Rancho Hotel where the walls were covered with signed pictures from movies stars from the era when Route 66 carried them through this seriously overbuilt lodge.
Gallup->Flagstaff
We drove through the Petrified Forest National park and inspected the extremely heavy chunks of wood/fossils that were over 225 million years old. The park had a late start, since just outside the southern gates, there looks to be more petrified wood chunks for sale outside the stores than all of the pieces combined within the huge park. Ah, capitalism. Another UNC basketball game was calling us when we reached Flagstaff and we lounged about watching it, while people were working on getting their first of the season sunburns outside on the patio. We stayed at the old Weatherford Inn which is a wonderful hotel with the one weak spot of being near the center train station and the 60 trains that go through town blowing their whistles all night long. Traveling with earplugs is a good thing. Haven’t needed them since India. Go Heels!
Flagstaff->Beatty’s
We scored some great Biff’s Bagels and garlic bagel chips on the way out of town. The girl at the counter said she had just started making them. Good stuff and we shortly realized we should have bought the other bag. Traveling through fields upon fields of desert flowers we reached Hoover Dam and an hour long trail of cars crossing it at 11AM on a Tuesday morning. We had no idea how close to Las Vegas the dam was, but we certainly are well aware of it now. That was a crazy amount of people. A bridge is being built beyond the dam to alleviate the traffic and probably to avoid having that much weight on the bridge everyday since the Lake Mead water level is half of what was when the dam was built. We cruised the Las Vegas strip and decided not to stay in town, but headed out to Beatty’s. We met some young Brits at the Sourdough Pizza and Pub and listened to their opinions of what they had seen between San Francisco and Beatty. It was something along the lines of: wow, what a big country.. it is way poorer than we expected.. and it is very surprising to see town after town look the same with all the same stores.. and your news is like The Sun.. And on the other side of us, we later met Baby Boomers (how can there be so many?!) from Eastern Oregon and they proceeded to advise us to retire early and buy an RV. We liked the sound of the first part, but given that this early in the season, the RV parks were showing No Vacancy signs already, we were really suspicious about the latter advice.
Beatty’s->China Lake/Riverville
Yet another National Park, this time Death Valley. Having traversed snow just a week ago, hanging out in the desert at 94 degrees was a bit disorienting, but we warmed up to it. We were just at the edge of surviving the short walks in the park in the heat. Add another five degrees and forget it. It was a great time to see the area, the wildflowers were blooming in every direction. The Toyota survived all the climbing. Standing at 232 feet below sea level in the valley and looking at the highest point in the US, Mt. Whitley (14,505′) gives an astounding amount of depth perspective to the valley. The evening spent in China Lake left us with one of the few meals we’ve walked out on after only one bite. We ordered some fajitas from a dumpy Mexican restaurant and they offered up a plate of chicken fat and gristle. Even by southeast asian standards, that’s beyond bad. What a dump of a town. We ended up at the Best Western in town and were assigned a room with a kitchen, so we recovered our evening and cooked up some fine aglio e olio.
Wildlife spotting: A roadrunner hanging out near the campground picnic tables.
Riverville->Three Rivers
We were headed towards Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and given the 90 degrees of the past couple of days, let the Nüvi pick our routing. Well, lo and behold, there’s still a few yards of snow left up in those there mountains and the roads usually stay closed until mid to late May. We backtracked and drove around the West side of the park through the orange groves and past the strawberry stands. We stopped at an orange stand and tried to buy just two naval oranges, we were laughed at and given two oranges for free. I guess their primary business is selling large boxes to the local grocery stores, eh? After that, while looking for a Swedish Bakery which ended up in a Nüvi routing failure, we instead stopped at bought a basket of strawberries from a Vietnamese family tending a small plot of them at the edge of a small town. Finally, small strawberries with flavor. So, we forgave the Nüvi and used it to select a random lunch spot. Porter Street BBQ in Porterville sounded nice, so off we went. We discovered the BBQ joint was just two southerners in the middle of a parking lot with a few permanent tables under a tree. Now, that has all the signs of being good BBQ! We ended up with a tri-tip sandwich with some fantastic sauce on a perfect bread roll. Is that really what the Arby’s chain was trying for? Arby’s should hang their corporate heads in complete shame. Our evening stop, landed us in Three Rivers, in a beautiful little town near the river (doh!) and at a Best Western that was since the last printing of the 2008 BW guide, now a ‘Best West’ and no longer part of the chain. We were soon to discover the reason for the parting of ways the next morning. As we turned on the water for a shower, there wasn’t a drop of warm, or even luke warm water coming out of the shower. We asked at the front desk and the Indian family informed us that maybe this evening the repair man will be out and have the gas heater fixed. Sigh, no shower.
Three Rivers->Los Banos
Showerless, we entered Sequoia National Park and the ranger asked us how our day was going. Well, showerless, we informed him. He queried us about where we were coming from and then laughed and said that he and his wife when they first took this ranger job were staying at that hotel for a few weeks. Nothing was ever working, since the family that ran it insisted on fixing everything themselves. He since then has a beautiful spot in the park housing.. with working warm water. The park was beautiful, the trees were big, the snow was still high (so most trails would take more effort than we were willing to give them since they required snow shoes) and the tourism was at a dull roar. After way too windy of a road leaving the park and a consensus by all within the vehicle that we’d been in the vehicle far too long without getting any walking, we finally, finally, finally, drove into Los Banos for the evening next to Gilroy. Another UNC game to watch, this time against WSU. Go Heels!
Los Banos->Santa Cruz
And this is where we stop the road trip for awhile, since you can never road trip through a town where you have lived for long periods of time. We did manage to get our Rio swapped out in Santa Cruz, though, so finally we will be able to listen to the radio again. Nothing like country music or Mexican music on the road.
