We stop, see the local color. But the problem is that the local color seems to brownish green. Welcome to Texas. We are already reduced to grilled cheese being the only vegetarian friendly option on the menu. Or, or pie.
Posts Tagged ‘cross country’
Gas somewhere in eastern New Mexico
April 24, 2012
383.4 miles, 16.484 gallons. They have 86 octane here but we put in 88. Have to check the manual. Spent $65.42. MPG is higher: 23.25, probably because we’ve been losing altitude since C’s now enjoying the faster speeds as well.
Never ending
April 24, 2012
Well, here we are in the middle of our monthlong journey. It has been weeks since we’ve slept well in our beds and seen our beloved pets.
What do you mean this is day three? I’m sure I’ve spent forever in this car, passing these monotonous plains, seeing pictures in clouds and bug splatters on the windshield.
We aren’t even out of New Mexico, this will go on for a long, long time.
Anyone know any good jokes?
A little tired
April 23, 2012I ended up driving the whole day today. C drove almost all of yesterday’s much longer leg. But I am a little tired now. Let me catalog how I felt when when we stopped (most of this was typed waiting for checking into the hotel and then waiting for dinner).
- My eyes feel like they went to the beach and rolled around in the sand without me. Then they were put back in with an air gun to dry them out.
- My eyelids are so heavy that every blink is an ever-increasingly-difficult effort of will. It made driving the last ten miles very difficult.
- My lips tingle with sunburn and I think I’m glad I can’t feel the tip of my nose.
- My fingers are tired both of gripping the steering wheel and tired of dangling limply from it.
- My ankle is tired as though my foot was really made of lead. The cruise control only helps so much and it was not enough.
- There is a muscle in my lower right back that has been threatening to cramp for the last hour. I think I can stretch it if I turn… aaaaaaah!!! not that way, no, don’t turn that way. That way leads to cramping.
- My insides are so jostled my pancreas thinks it is my kidney and does not know how to do its new job.
- My throat is so dry, I expect a tumbleweed to tumble out of my mouth. And yet my bladder is so full the it is going to be a disaster soon. How is this dichotomy possible?
- My sinuses are so full of dirt and pollen from unknown plants, they don’t know whether to be stuffy or leathery dry, mirroring my windburned cheeks. So each one has done something different.
- My hip hurts (though, really, not as much as I expected so this one is kind of a win).
- My butt, though, oh, that doesn’t bear thinking about. Maybe if I don’t think about it the pain will go away. I may never sit down again. Certainly, I’ll need a tailbone transplant before we go on.
- Even my hair feels tired.
A beer and some dinner and I already feel better. A quick shower before bed and I’ll be fine tomorrow. I hope. I suspect we’ll be sharing the driving duties from now on.
Can’t go on
April 23, 2012We went to the Petrified Forest National Park today.
I was driving this morning (or there would have been a post posted about Meteor Crater while we were in the car instead of much later). Anyway, I didn’t get a snack when I should have and ended up way too hungry. I’d hiked around Flagstaff’s outskirts and Meteor Crater on a breakfast of coffee and a protein bar.
So, I had gotten well into the low blood sugar mode that includes tired headaches, finding concentration difficult (kind of important when going that fast). I wasn’t sure I really wanted to see something else new. But we had a picnic lunch and needed a place to eat it.
When we finally got to the exit for the Petrified Forest, we got out at the visitor center with our picnic (grocery store bagels, cheese, hummus and a half pound of fresh cut fruit). I gobbled it down and felt much better, like we should go on and see whatever it is they made a national park around before heading off to Albuquerque.
OMG, I think I may be the first person to have discovered this incredibly beautiful place. (Yeah, the roads and paved paths managed to leave me that illusion.) I mean, have you seen the Painted Desert? It was incredible. As with Meteor Crater, no picture does it justice. It was huge. More than, that though, the Painted Desert was incredibly, awesomely beautiful.
I look at that picture and it is missing all the colors, the incredible striations and hills of individual colors. The sky was huge, like the normal California sky is just a little bitty part of the sky here. I don’t have the words and I don’t think the pictures are enough but they are better than the words so I’ll choose only a few more.
These pictures are just reminders to me, like a short list jotted down means a lot more to the person who wrote the list than to someone who comes across it later. Imagine that level of difference between these pictures and the real thing. Then multiply by ten.
It just went on and on. We went to several vista points and each one was majestic and breathtaking.
But this national park is not a mesmerizingly beautiful one-trick pony. It also has evidence of indigenous people, including the ruins of a pueblo city and Newspaper Rock, a wall of petroglyphs. Further on, there are huge logs of petrified wood, each one a giant jewel from eons ago. I don’t mean little chips of wood-rocks. These were giant trees make into giant geode colored rocks.
However, we didn’t see those. We got to the end of the Painted Desert and didn’t go on. Part of the reason was because C was tired (didn’t sleep well last night) and we were both pretty hot. But that wasn’t really it…
I couldn’t take in anymore. The painted desert was so mindblowingly beautiful that I was a little afraid to go on. What could be a second act to that? Why dilute the beauty?
And, part of me wondered, what if it got better? My brain was full of the box of paints splattered across the desert. If it got better, it (my brain) was just going to go kablooey.
I turned that into a joke but I meant it, I really didn’t want to go on because I wanted to let my mind settle, to soak up what I had and to fix the picture in my head that my camera just can’t capture.