Mini Mileage

To avoid the long slog on the rough surfaced, 18-wheeler dense I-40 and crazy dense traffic of Las Vegas, our usual route home, we choose to go north and west first from Santa Fe. This way we will do the quieter less traffic route of Green River, UT to Ely, NV to Carson City, NV to home. But Santa Fe all the way to Green River is 421 miles and 8 hours of driving, so we broke it into 2 smaller segments. Because we were going to leave Santa Fe after lunch, Wednesday’s leg was a shorter 150 mile, three hour drive making today’s drive a 250 miles five hour affair.

Along with the better driving conditions we got a couple of other bonuses out of it. We were going to pass through Cortez, Colorado again so that we might be able to eat at The Farm Bistro that was closed on the way east because it was Saturday and boy was it worth it, the food was fantastic, the portion size was perfect and it was priced very reasonably. We also got a chance at one last Roadside America photo op. At the Mud Creek Hogan Trading Post the previous owner stuck about a dozen telephone poles fitted with giant arrowheads and feather fletchings into the ground at an angle (see above.)

Come to think of it, make it four bonuses. We had never traveled any of the first leg and the scenery was beautiful. Then on the second leg, where we had been on the roads before, this time we were driving in the opposite direction so everything was new to us and startling beautiful as well.

Not long after leaving last night’s stop in Pagosa Springs the Mini flew by 36,000 miles on the odometer.

There is a reason we picked this particular spot to stop along the way west, it is home to Donna’s older brother Steve. We had dinner with him at the local Cracker Barrel. The last time we saw him was when we were headed to Lake Tahoe for a niece’s wedding back in 2018.

We started the day in Killeen and ended in Odessa. The title of todays posts went from 35,000 Black-eyed Susans along the roadsides of the hill country to 35,000 wind turbines the further west we went and ended it up what you see above when we entered the Permian Basin. There were no real Roadside America goals today, but we did stumble on a couple of things right here in Odessa. An even bigger long horn skull than we found in Albany, TX a week ago on our way east and a Stonehenge replica on the campus of the University of Texas Permian Basin.

About 100 miles west of Killeen the Mini eased past the 35,000 mile mark.

Today was one of our shorter driving days, only 219 miles, but we had 8 objectives to find on our Roadside America list. We found and photographed five: Flying Fortress of the Plains in Hobbs, NM, Missile Water Towers in Seminole TX, Yard Art & 1935 Triangle-Shaped Gas Station in Snyder, TX and finally the National WASP Museum and Site in Sweetwater, TX. We saw one other, the Uniroyal Gal – Tornadoes Cheerleader in Lamesa, TX, but there were a bunch of folks out front of the tire store so we just drove by.

We didn’t see the Quanah Parker Arrow that was in downtown Seminole because the traffic was pretty busy. When we got to the second one in Snyder, I saw the arrow and its location, I just knew we had seen it before and taken a picture of it already on a previous trip this way. Even though we didn’t get those two, between those two cities, we stumbled on one in the really small town of Gail, which is where the picture above was taken.

There are not 33,000 Quanah Parker Arrows piercing the Texas Plains, just eighty-eight and each denotes a particular site of Comanche and Quanah Parker’s history. Here is an article telling about how they came to be. About halfway along today’s route the Mini crossed over the 33,000 mile mark.

After breakfast at the hotel we headed to downtown Ely, Nevada to check out all the murals there. Donna had picked up a brochure about them the last time we were here. Several of them were very nice, but after seeing a half dozen or so we ran out of patience for trying to match the brochure to the murals. For such a small town there was a high density of Chevy Corvettes lurking around on the streets. There were also an awful lot of current American muscle cars as well. Somehow we had managed to arrive in Ely (pronounced eel • eee) for the opening of the Nevada Open Road Challenge weekend.

While bopping along east on US6/50, our planned route for the day, about 50 miles into it we came to a line of slow moving cars ahead of us. A 1/4 mile ahead we could see flashing lights of a highway patrol car that was behind a great big ol’ thing that was taking up the whole two lane road. There were additional highway patrol cars ahead getting oncoming cars to get off the pavement. The convoy was traveling about 30MPH on a road marked for 70, but in a way we definitely got lucky on when we caught up to this mess.

Because just a couple miles of creeping along, like magic, an alternate route presented itself, Nevada 487 which turned towards the Great Basin National Park and we took it. A quick check of Google Maps showed that if we continued along that road it would take us on a southern loop to I-15 that would get us back on track and only costing us 30 miles and 30 minutes. This was a route that Donna had mentioned possibly taking anyway, so it did work out real well. It even led us to an awesome taco place in Milford, UT called Brody’s. Donna had 2 pollo & I had 2 al pastor which was just the right size in quantity and price.

Somewhere along today’s route while dodging approximately thirty one thousands pounds of big ol’ piece of machinery the Mini’s odometer clicked past the 31,000 mile mark.

Along the way we managed to snag a couple more Roadside America oddities, an ranch entry arch made entirely of antelope antlers and some fuel tanks painted as soft drink cans.