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Mom and I began our Crazy Summer Roadtrip A La Thelma And Louise But Without The Murders and Driving Off Cliffs this morning.
(I’ve posted my photos on Flickr.)
It’s funny how your perception of how long you’re spending in the car (or, I suppose, any mode of transportation) is relative to your total travel time. For instance, the 4-1/2 hour drive to Houston from Dallas seems to take absolutely forever, yet the eleven hours we spent in the car today seemed to go by fairly quickly, and I think that it’s because I know we have another three or four full days still to drive. So does 1/4 of a journey always feel like 1/4 of a journey, no matter how long that journey is?
At any rate, we spent most of today in Texas. I’ve lived here my whole life (sigh) and I still marvel at the fact that one can drive literally all day and still be in this same damn state.
That being said, West Texas skies are amazing. So big.
Here is the route for today:
635 to 35 in Dallas.
35 to 380 in Denton.
380 to 287 in Decatur.
287 to 40 in Amarillo.
40 to 385 in Vega.
385 to 87 in Dalhart.
87 to 25 in Raton, NM.
And 25 to Trinidad, CO, which is where we are right now.
Just outside of Amarillo, we stopped at Cadillac Ranch. I have wanted to see Cadillac Ranch ever since I first heard of it years ago, and now I am very happy that I can cross this one off my Must Do Before I Die list. It seems a little less “larger than life” than I was expecting (Cadillacs 20 feet tall? Not so much), but it was still pretty cool.
Normally I really like New Mexico, but today it completely sucked. The little northeast corner that we drove through had road construction literally the entire way, and the speed limit averaged 45.
Tilly and Tigger (mom’s black lab puppy and stripey cat) did amazingly well in the car. Tigger spent most of the time curled up in her litterbox on the floor behind the driver’s seat, and Tilly slept on her fuzzy sheepskin dog bed on top of the luggage in the backseat. We made a lot of puppy pee stops (although Tilly was much more interested in chasing grasshoppers), and it was really nice to stop frequently just to get out and stretch.
In fact, I really like travelling without a set schedule. We don’t have to be in Seattle on a particular day and we don’t have motel reservations anywhere along the way. It is so much more relaxing this way.
So now we are in a motel in Trinidad, which is just inside the Colorado border. We found a nice place that has free wi-fi (woot!) and takes dogs and cats, but the tradeoff is that we are in a smoking room that smells really awfully strongly of tobacco. We were just too tired to drive any further to look for another place, though.
Sprint tells me that I have full coverage in Trinidad, but it lies. I am on stupid Roaming, which I do not use, so I cannot call anyone. Not that I particularly enjoy talking on the phone, but I did get two calls that I couldn’t answer so as not to rack up hideous roaming charges.