Day 1: Friday, June 7
So the trip started not so well. I pulled up the email I'd sent myself of the route to take from San Antonio to Carlsbad and loaded the trip on Google Maps ... and it wouldn't run. I sat in my driveway for like 15 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong, then finally decided to continue my quest over breakfast, as it was already close to 9am. Drove up to my favourite taquería on Hildebrand, and it started just as it should have in my driveway. So problem solved.
Google Maps had offered me three routes heading out of town. I selected the eco-friendliest route (because it involved the least time of freeways), but by the time I got on I-10 (a distance of maybe 8 blocks) it had reverted to the route that took me up the freeway all the way to Boerne. I took the route I'd planned anyway, through Helotes. Started my first audiobook, a Jeffrey Archer novel from 2019 called Nothing Ventured, and after maybe three minutes I was pretty sure I'd listened to this book before.
One of the nice things about me and audiobooks (or regular books, for that matter) is that while I will recognize a book on hearing it, I won't remember what happens in it until it happens. When it comes to fiction, I have the memory of a goldfish. And the nice thing about Jeffrey Archer is that his books are basically long concatenations of small dramatic occurrences, each one as insignificant as the one before, that add up to an entertaining though not very gripping story. This one concerns a top lawyer's son who decides to become a policeman, and how he gets to realize his dreams. By my recollection, there's a happy ending involving some paintings caught up in a divorce and a man wrongly convicted of murder, but who cares? It's just a trivial story to pass the hours and the miles.
I had forgotten how beautiful the road is from Vanderpool to Camp Wood. The two-lane highway is carved into the sides of fairly steep hills, with lots of winding 20mph curves and signs warning you about how many motorcyclists have been killed there lately. Fortunately at that point I still had the top down, but by the time I got to about Rocksprings it was hot enough to put it back up.
I was on Texas Hwy 55, heading for Rocksprings when I pulled off to raise the top and meanwhile delete the next stop on the Google Maps route (because I'd already gotten that far) but the app was unresponsive. After trying a number of times to continue the navigation, I realized it wasn't responding because I didn't have a signal. So I just closed it. A little while later, in Sonora, I tried to turn it on again, but once again it wouldn't start. Damn it! So I pulled into a DQ for lunch (a single hamburger, water, no fries -- going to try to come home a little lighter than I left) and the app was working perfectly again.
So my understanding is that Google Maps will only start working when you're at a restaurant.
After Sonora it was freeway all the way to Fort Stockton, then arrow-straight highway into Carlsbad, where I am now, in a slightly déclassé Super 8 motel. I went down the road (this town really only has three, like a Mercedes star) for dinner to a place that I couldn't find despite Google Maps insistence that it was right there, on the right, so I went to a different place, one that I could actually see. It wasn't bad. I'm not wild about the seasonings used in Mexican food in New Mexico, so I ordered enchiladas verdes. The chicken in the enchiladas was a little dry and the refritos were infested with the unpleasant seasonings of the local area, but the rice was good and I left reasonably satisfied. The odious practice of adding a charge for credit cards has hit this area, I saw. The charge was about 4% of the bill, which is more than my cashback reward, so I paid cash, confident that I can find an ATM in Arizona and California much easier than I could in North Carolina. I already know where they are.
There's not a lot to see along the way through New Mexico tomorrow. My first stop is a waterfall, about an hour out of my way, but I have plenty of time. I'm tempted to stop at the Living Desert Zoo here in Carlsbad; Sherry and I went there some years ago, and all I remember about it is that it was small and I petted a raven. But it opens at eight and if I spend an hour there, it'll be ten before I get to the waterfall, and I'd kind of like to see it when it's still cool enough to enjoy. (It was 108 when I checked into my hotel here this afternoon.)
The route I have laid out for tomorrow is a little over 9 hours of driving, to a place called Springerville, Arizona, and the thing that concerns me about it is that, in the long stretch of highway leading to that town, there's not another motel for like 100 miles. So even though I don't really want to drive that long, there's really no alternative. So I booked a hotel there for tomorrow night.
I yearn for the old days, when I could just pull into a town and find a decent hotel without a reservation. But there are too many other people out on the roads these days, so I've learned I either have to stop early, like by 6pm, or make a reservation. Why can't these people stay home!
Two other things worth mentioning. First, after living for half a century and more in Texas, this morning I saw my first diamondback rattlesnake in the wild. It was on the edge of the road, and while I didn't get a great look at it, I could see it was clearly a rattler. So I can check that off my bucket list. (I saw a huge tarantula crossing the road, too, but I'd seen those before.) Second, I got a chip in my windshield this afternoon, right in front of the driver's seat, at eye level. I called to see about getting it fixed right away, because I don't want a crack to form in that part of the windshield. (The other side, who cares? I have a crack there already, caused when the windshield got chipped at the very bottom edge and I couldn't find it, so I thought it wasn't chipped, until the crack started across the bottom of the windshield. Drove my friend Marty crazy.) So the insurance guy tells me that, if it's right in the driver's line of sight I might want to get the windshield replaced instead of repaired, because the repair would still be visible and it will drive me nuts having to see it all the time. So long story short, when I get back to San Antonio I have an appointment to get a new windshield.
No pictures today. As pretty as that road is out of Vanderpool, it's not photogenic ... though I came close to stopping for pictures anyway. But no.
Day 2: Saturday, June 8
The first order of business this morning was coffee. Ordinarily I'd have a cup at the hotel before moving on to more promising sources, but last night's overpriced hotel didn't even offer that amenity. Luckily there was an Allsop's convenience store along the early part of my route, and one with surprisingly good coffee. Should've gotten the larger size, but one can never tell, can one?
And of course Google Maps presented me with issues; several times during the day, in fact. Once again, the restaurant curse held, as did the lack of a signal in a number of places, including one intersection where I literally had no clue which way to go. I should have gotten out the road atlas my nephew gave me for Christmas year before last, but instead I flipped a mental coin and headed off. (The atlas did come out later, when another gap in cell coverage left me in the Google Maps lurch.)
Surprisingly, even before Google Maps caused me problems, RoadTrippers failed me. Once again, it does not recognize my premium subscription, and this trip no longer appears on my profile. I emailed the sons of bitches about it, but it's Saturday and I don't expect to get help before Monday. This is a serious enough failing that I am considering abandoning the app altogether. (News break: this evening the trip was back on my profile and everything seems to be working fine.)
The road to Sitting Bull Falls was paved all the way, except for a single stretch of about fifteen yards in the middle where it looked like the pavement had been taken up and then the resurfacing project forgotten about. I would say that was no big deal, except that one feature of the lacuna was a fairly sharp drop-off at the beginning, which caused some kind of connection in the car to come loose. My dashboard began flashing the message "Check rear lights. Cruise not available." I did check the rear lights -- taillights and turn signals; I have no way to check the brake lights by myself -- and found no problem. The cruise control, I found, didn't work.
I rebooted the system by turning it off and turning it back on, and everything was fine, though later the problem recurred. Since I didn't need cruise control I wasn't too concerned, and indeed later another reboot resolved the issue again. Still later I used the cruise control without problem, though the message did return briefly near the end of the day. I don't know if this is really a problem I need to worry about or not. Maybe while I'm in LA I can remember to have Hank take a look at the brake lights for me; that's really all I'm worried about.
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Sitting Bull Falls
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Sitting Bull Falls is a very pretty place. It's not a gushing torrent by any means, certainly not at this time of year. It's just a pleasant trickle of water down a long steep cliff, with lush vegetation at the top where water seeps through myriad channels before dropping into a pond, and flowing from there down through a canyon, eventually to join the often-pathetic Pecos River near the Texas state line. It took me nearly an hour to get there, and I spent perhaps fifteen minutes at the falls, which are concealed behind a mesa just a two-minute stroll from the parking area. It's the only thing there is to see in New Mexico other than things I've already seen. But the only place in the state I really want to go back to is White Sands. I saw it in the distance this morning after cresting the Sacramento Mountains at Cloudcroft, and gave some halfway-serious thought to changing my plans and going there. But it was really too late in the day by then. White Sands really cries out to be visited when the sun is low in the sky.
(Later in the day I drove through the Very Large Array, a bunch of radio-telescope dishes spread across the middle of the state for several miles. I'd been there with my friend Rick, on the Voyage of Discovery Trip many years ago. It was one of the lesser sights we saw on that occasion and is no more impressive now, though it now boasts a Visitor's Center just off the highway. That seems a genuine waste of government resources, as there's nothing about the VLA that couldn't be served by a nice big sign.)
Because I hadn't been hungry when I left the hotel this morning, I didn't have breakfast before going to the falls. And it was an even longer drive, an hour and a half, from the falls to the first decent restaurant ... which turned out to be a place called Alma's, in Artesia, New Mexico. I ordered a green chili burrito, but it was nowhere near as good as the ones Sherry and I always get at Sierra Blanca, near Raton, on almost every trip to Colorado.
By the time breakfast was over it was about 11AM, and the heat was building. But I left the top down because, even though it was in excess of 94 degrees (which is my theoretical breaking point), it was a dry heat, and still reasonably comfortable. Before it got beyond 97, I was climbing up into the Sacramentos, and the temperature started dropping. I hit a rainshower along the way, by which time the temperature had dropped to 61, and I should have been cold (top still down, despite the rain), but I wasn't. By the time I stopped for a bathroom break in Cloudcroft, I was dry again.
The top stayed down most of the day, but eventually I gave in. Still later, having climbed into the high plateaus of western New Mexico, it came back down, and it was glorious. I'm going to miss this car.
I've had two people compliment me on the car so far on this trip. The first, yesterday, was a near-toothless middle-aged woman in a beat-up pickup truck, whose clothing suggested she had never actually seen a Wal-Mart, so I wasn't too impressed by her appreciation of its beauty and grace. The second occurred today, while gassing up at another Allsup's. This time the compliment came from a man of my generation. He asked about the marque's reputation and I told him what I thought of it (without using the standard line, "Prettiest car you'll ever see broken down at the side of the road"). That prompted the information that he was an engineer himself, and so he had to tell me the story of his meeting with the guy who developed Beta video tech for Sony back in whatever decade that happened. I wanted to tell him the story about the airship de-icing mechanism, but it was too hot at that point to stand out in the heat swapping tales.
So. Tonight I'm going to actually load my planned journey for tomorrow onto Google Maps de novo, in the hope that it will work correctly without having to go to a restaurant. (I'm in Springerville, Arizona, in an off-brand motel called Travel Inn. Much nicer than last night's Super 8, and much cheaper. And dinner, at a local restaurant called Safire, was a house salad and one cheese enchilada covered with green chili sauce almost as good as at Sierra Blanca. I may go back for breakfast, except they don't open until 7 and I hope to be long gone by then.)
Oh, and a P.S.: I finished the Jeffrey Archer book, and am reminded of why I don't listen to his stuff anymore. He uses a lot of courtroom scenes, and they are so dismally superficial that I find it more trying that watching an episode of Matlock. The two trials that feature in this particular book were both so ridiculously superficial in presentation (for dramatic effect, but to excess) that it was unbearable for me in the end.
On the other hand, I've started listening to a book called Unruly, about the kings and queens of England. It's written and performed by an English comedian with an interest in history, so it's very funny (to me, anyway; I love the British wit). Sherry would love it, too. I should tell her. But maybe she'll read it here.
