Well it had to happen, 7 days, over 3000 miles and four blokes in a car with dirty laundry, the cracks are beginning to show, and I don't mean the one from Rag's trousers slipping down.
Today was tough, another 520 miles, one new state and one new time zone. We have made it to the far border of New Mexico and into Mountain time.
We are all beginning to get tired from the constant travelling and the unknowns of a different motel each night, plus a lot of beer was consumed yesterday. Rag's GPS tracking tool had failed last night as you can probably tell from above, we did escape the hell hole that was Beloit, unfortunately the tracker doesn't think so, which was annoying him. Ivan was beginning to get bored of the constant travelling and the failure to jump on a train for a change of scene for a day or so this was also beginning to take it's toll. I was also getting concerned that all of the additional stops along the way were making our arrival time in Vegas quite late, plus with the weekend taken up by the NASCAR, I'd have no time to gamble.
Anyway we set off and took a last look at the steakhouse to see how many body bags they were unloading in the morning and headed off towards Roswell. To say that drive was dull was an understatement, the only highlight was for me as I managed to get the caravan up to 95 mph. Trust me, on a Sunday morning there was no one else on a road so straight it disappeared off the end of the horizon. In fact I did get some enjoyment from driving through the tumbleweeds blowing across the road, when you hit them at that speed they totally disintegrate.
We did pass through a couple of interesting towns, they all seem to have at least one or two mottos, we liked the one for Portales (
See Day 7 Road Trip Photos). We also passed through Friona in Texas which claimed to be the Cheeseburger capital of Texas. What amazed us was that other than a Sonic burger outlet (see previous posts on thoughts of their fare) we could not find anywhere that actually sold cheeseburgers.
Doing a bit of research it is because they hold an annual cheeseburger festival and have more head of cattle within a 50 mile radius than anywhere else.
Anyway, we arrived in Roswell just before lunch and were driving down the main street and were failing to find anything alien or crash related whatsoever. We decided to pull in and do a quick Google to find that there was a UFO museum that was free to enter but a $2 donation was suggested, but nothing much else listed. We found the museum and parked outside, went in and found that we had to sign the guestbook, so decided just to go to the gift shop only to find that we needed to sign the book for that also, so just went up the road, found a tat shop, bought some tat and went back to the car. Within 15 minutes we’d turned the car around, taken a couple of photos and headed back out of town. If we thought Bald Knob was disappointing, this was even worse. We weren’t sure what to expect but we expected more. Here was another opportunity to cash in and the mettle had failed to be grasped.
Our next port of call was Tucson Arizona, but we knew that was out of our reach for the day so just headed out as far as we could towards the border. We had to make a quick stop at the Billy the Kid museum where we found an interesting guest in the toilets (
See Day 7 Road Trip Photos), but other than that, it was a pretty long drive through some very interesting but very samey type lanDSCapes. We hadn’t really associated New Mexico with mountains and snow but that is what we found, it is quite picturesque in small doses.
We have ended up in Lordsburg a few miles from the border with Arizona, yet another town made up of broken down houses and closed businesses with a few chain motels and fast food outlets next to the interstate, kind of what we are now used to on this trip.
Tomorrow is an Arizona day, with the plan to end up on the far border with California at the end of the day. At that point we may split the party in two, but that is still to come.
As today was a quiet day, I will fill in a bit more detail of incidents I had previously failed to blog.
When we landed in Beloit (yes there again) we were looking for somewhere to buy beer so I looked in the Yellow pages, I found a shop called Richard Liquor which made us laugh (what is the shortened form of the name Richard - look if I have to explain it further the humour is obviously above you).
We also had an interesting phone call yesterday morning. It was the Days Inn from Fayetteville asking if we’d accidentally packed one of their pillows when we’d left Friday morning. Hmmm, how do you accidentally pack a pillow? Again I won’t incriminate the culprit, however we did do a good job of convincing the poor lady on the other end of the phone that we didn’t have it. We’ll only know for certain if they believed us or not when Rag gets his credit card statement and we see if an extra $10 has been added or not. I suppose it wouldn’t count if we left it behind in the next Days Inn that we stay in. I suppose if we are not endangering our lives on this trip we are becoming petty criminals, it wouldn’t be a road trip without a little rule bending.
