Santa Fe – Day 6: Check Surroundings For Safety or Big Robot, Little Dog

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Eighty Foot Tall Robot

Today’s Roadside America picture is of an 80-foot-tall robot that shares a parking lot with a giant spider and a huge wolf here in Santa Fe. It only added a couple miles to my morning run to Dunkin.

After finishing my breakfast and coffee, it was time to head south to the town that Bugs Bunny keeps making wrong turns in, Albuquerque, to visit the Revlimiter Factory to get some nifty custom gauges installed. Adam will install the gauge faces for you for an extra fee, but you have to remove them from the car and mail them to him. Instead of mailing my cluster to Adam, I brought the whole car to him. I disassembled what seems like the entire dashboard of the car with his guidance so we could get the gauge cluster out of the car. Adam then gloved up like a surgeon to swap out the actual faces. We then tag-teamed the reinstallation and assembly of the dash.

I was so busy “fan girling” about being at the epicenter of Revlimiterness that I forgot to take any pictures. Adam actually moved the famous Sharka out onto the driveway, under a tree no less, so that I could pull into the garage. Mona, the transforming ND RF, was parked in one garage bay over. Anyway, the pics below happened once I got back to Santa Fe.

I had one last request of Adam. Some people get Tom Matano, a founding father of the Miata, to sign their trunk lid. Hah, that’s nothing. I got Mr. Revlimiter to sign my trunk lid, right on his sticker. And I got to meet Mabel the wonder dog too, and she loves me. I got the sticker to prove it.

Santa Fe – Day 5: “I Made Rice!”

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Gates of Santa Fe 3


Gates of Santa Fe 3 
Tonight was dinner in, and Sally cooked us up some shrimp etouffee. It was supposed to be something else but came as a last-minute addition because there was a nice deal at Smith’s for raw shrimp at $4.99 a pound. This also means she got to try out a microwave rice cooker her friend Kevin recommended.

Ever since she has lived in Santa Fe, she has not been able to get her rice fully cooked. The center always ended up crunchy, and if it was cooked more, the rice would be mushy. She is blaming it on the 7,000′ elevation, but it also might be the lack of moisture in the desert air.

The cooker came with instructions that laid out how much water and how long to cook it for several different types of rice. I was also optimized for an 800-watt microwave, so she had to cook it at 80% power in her 1,000-watt oven. When she tasted the rice, she proudly shouted, “I Made Rice!” Quickly followed by, “There’ll be no living with Kevin now.”

Bonus Roadside America photo:

Life-size Brontosaurus Family

Santa Fe – Day 4: Baby It’s Cold Outside

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Shop Here


 
This morning we woke to colder than normal May weather in Santa Fe, the temps were in the mid 30’s. My morning drive to get a Dunkin’ coffee was shrouded in fog. The temperature barely moved, and if anything, they decreased close to freezing. Then it started raining lightly on and off, and there might have been a flurry or two in there as well.

Because we didn’t walk much in Hammond, and yesterday in Santa Fe we barely walked a 1/4 mile before it started to drip from the sky and we turned tail for home, we decided to go walking/shopping at the semi-filled Santa Fe Place Mall. We were still shopping for shoes for Sally, and she did find a pair at another Shoe Show or Shoe Town or Show Something.

Wanting more, we headed over to the almost really Fashion Outlets of Santa Fe to the Merrill store. It advertised “Buy One, Get One 1/2 Price.” I was sort of shopping for shoes too since I donated the Skechers Step-Ins because the tread pattern was a magnet for small rocks that I had to pick out every time I walked in them. She found a pair that was on clearance that started at $50 and was marked down to $25. I, of course, found a pair of Jungle Mocs that I used to wear back in my ASCO days and loved at the full price of $99.

Naturally they take the 50% off of the cheapest shoes, so Sally got out of there at a measly $12.50 while I spent nearly a C-note. When I tried to reason with her that maybe she should give me $12.50 seeing as my buying that pair of expensive shoes, I earned it. What if I didn’t buy shoes? She shut me up with, “I’d just buy a second pair.” Sigh.

Santa Fe – Day 3: All Hail Blue Miatas

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The Blues Brothers

This morning I headed over to O’Reilly’s and bought a new set of wipers for the Tucson: 26″ driver’s side and 16″ passenger. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a bright blue Miata. Oooh, an NC Winning Blue. I just had to park next to it and fire off a couple of pics.

We had scattered rain both in Hammond and on the trip home, and the wipers on Santa Fe Sally’s Tucson are the original ones from June of 2023. It is not like they wore out; not a lot of swipes when you live in the desert, but that same desert dries them out. All that is to say, they didn’t so much as clear the windshield as smear it.

She is due to get that windshield replaced on Friday, and they offered to change her wiper blades while they are at it for an extra $75, and she thought she would let them do it. While that sounded like a lot to me, a frequent refrain from the elder me, it is about right. Because of the weather predicted for this area the rest of the week, I told her that if she intended for me to be driving her around in Tucson, she was out of luck. I, for some reason, like to be able to see things while behind the wheel.

All Hail The Miata

It has been raining on and off with differing intensities all day. But we have also had 2 instances of hail today. The first was green olive-sized (no pimento), and the second shorter bout was just pea-sized. Neither incident was bad enough to cause any damage to the car, the top is new taut canvas, and the vinyl wrap probably added a little extra layer of protection.

Road Trip – Day 8: I Despise I Forty

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Sunrise Shovel

Back to an actual Roadside America picture that you can find on the website, this is the Largest Shovel in Texas. How do they know? Just because the construction company that put it up says so? Texas is pretty big; maybe there is a bigger one in the eastern side of the state. They estimate it is 15′ tall, and to me, that doesn’t sound that big. And even if it is the largest, someone will take that as a challenge and make one 25′ tall somewhere else in the state.

From Bowie, TX to Santa Fe, NM is approximately 550 miles, and almost exactly one half of that drive was along I-40. Today there was a pretty stiff crosswind, and it seemed like 80% of the traffic was 18-wheelers trying to stay in their lanes. Lone truck drivers hauling ass, corporate drivers who might be speed limited, and any others that might be worried about many points they have on their driver’s licenses. Mix in pickups hauling giant camper homes and skittish auto drivers, and you make for a very exciting, AKA tense, drive.

When I do head east next weekend, I will only cross I-40 once on my way to get on US-60 & 84 to get to Lubbock, TX where I’ll pick up US-82 to finish off Texas. I’m sure I will run into plenty of big rigs, but it should be easier to pick them off (pass) one at a time than when they are in a big formation like B-17s on their way to bomb Berlin.

Road Trip – Day 7: Rust in Peace

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Rust in Peace


 
No actual Roadside America picture today, but if the photos here in this post don’t technically qualify, at least for me they sure do.

For the second morning in a row I slept right through my alarm. I have it set for 6:00 AM and I woke up both days at 6:20 without hearing it. It is not like I changed the alarm sound; it is the same one I’ve been using for months, so tonight I’m going to change it to a bugler playing reville.

Kinda wish I could find what they used to play aboard the U.S.S. Midway when I served aboard it in the 70s. They didn’t actually use a bugle, the officer of the deck, at 6 AM would announce, “Reveille, now reville, drop your cocks and grab your socks.” “The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces.” “Sweepers, man your brooms, fore and aft.”

Nowadays, with women serving aboard ships, I wonder how that first phrase could be modified for the female gender?

Hammond – Day 7: Four Forks and a Feeding Frenzy

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Sally has been talking about wanting to go to B&J’s Seafood to get a po’boy almost since we got here. But family plans have been getting the preferential treatment so far. There was a moment earlier this week when it could have happened, but the parking lot was overflowing, and even the across-the-street lot was full.

Sweet Heat For Your Meat

It had to happen today because it was our last day in Hammond, and Louisiana. If it didn’t happen, she would have been talking about not getting to eat from there all the way back to Santa Fe, so we broke down and set out early for a meal. She got her soft-shell crab po’boy, and I got one with crawfish. Both are on the cusp of their seasons, hers waning and mine waxing. Killing time while waiting for our order, I perused the plethora of spices, rubs, and seasonings. Sweet Heat For Your Meat stood out, mainly for its package art.

The food there is great, and it is apparently true about not being able to rush greatness, as it took nearly 30 minutes to get our to-go order. At the table in the Airbnb, if you listened carefully, you could hear us actually purring quietly while polishing those sandwiches off. Trouble is now she probably won’t stop talking about how good it was all the way back to Santa Fe.

Tonight’s meal is back at Adele’s with older brother Steve and his wife Janet. For our dessert, we were tasked with picking up a couple of slices of cake from The Cocoa Bean Bakery. Their cakes are beautiful to look at and delicious to eat. Their 9″ cakes feed up to 20 because of their height. Each slice is $4.25, so you do the math on the total cost of that cake. The woman behind the counter asked if we wanted them in two different boxes, and Sally replied, “Don’t bother; we’ll put it in the center of the table, and it’ll be four forks and a feeding frenzy.”

Those po’boys were worth the wait, and the cake was worth the cost.