Roadside America

2025 Jumbo Road Trip – Day 3

Leave a Comment

The Mittens in Monument Valley

It has been a long day and I’m beat. I stopped to get three different Roadside America pictures, two of which made the cut. See below or on Instagram. The biggest item of the day was the above picture, the Mittens in Monument Valley. I stopped in and had to wrangle a single seat on a tour. I tried to reserve on line, but there was zero options available for a single, it started at 2 and went up. I can sort of get the reason, it like a cruise ship all there cabins are for two and these tour vehicles seat twelve. But what happens if you get a family of three?

Anyway, I did get on a tour and there was an empty seat beside me. I thought I was getting a 2-hour tour, but as it turned out it was a 2-1/2 hour tour, which in the end, ended up being 3 hours long. At the finish I was bounced, shaken, stirred, slightly sunburned, very wind blown with sand in my shoes and dirt in my nostrils. The guide was great, informative and entertaining. Because it is a guided tour we also got to go places and see things the peasant don’t on their $8 a head self-guided 2-hour loop.

Tomorrow I get to Santa Fe where I can wash some clothes and the dead bugs off the Miata.

2025 Jumbo Road Trip – Day 2

Leave a Comment

Texaco Big Friend – Service Station Man

Day #2 Roadside America Pic: Texaco Big Friend – Service Station Man in Springville, UT at a very large Motorcycle Shop that included a Motorcycle Museum and a Motorcycle themed restaurant. Note the puny human on the left for scale.

I got out the door of the hotel at around 6:00 but didn’t hit the Interstate ’til later. Part of the time lost was getting a latte at The Human Bean and then breakfast at a Jack in the Box. When I went back up front to get some napkins the Shift Leader was placing little plastic eggs all around. I looked at her quizzically and she said that none of the people that worked there had never seen this particular Easter tradition. She was the only one I interacted with, so I have no idea why someone had never had an Easter Egg Hunt and I didn’t ask.

Easter Egg Hunt at Jack’s

2025 Jumbo Road Trip – Day 1

Leave a Comment

The above image of the World’s Largest Map of the Oregon Trail is from Baker City and is the first of many (I hope) Roadside America pictures from this trip. I’ll try and find one on each I’m travelling. We’ll see how that works out.

I got a 7:30 start and ended up at the hotel in Boise 5:30, but that is Mountain Time, so it was 4:30 on my internal clock. Google says I should have taken 6-1/2 hours to do it, but all my wandering and break taking made it a 9 hour trip. First off I managed to shoehorn in 4 Post Office pictures, a leisurely lunch in Le Grand of pizza slices and salad, a gas stop and literal walk in the park in Baker City. I also didn’t help that I tried to dodge Friday rush hour in Boise by taking some surface streets that really just delayed the inevitable loss of time.

Monumental

So, for episode 2 of “Driving Ms. Sally” in late April I’ll be driving down to Santa Fe instead of flying. Because after we get back to Santa Fe from the Hammond visit, I’m leaving Sally there and I’m going to continue driving around the country visiting folks. On the trip down I want to visit Monument Valley. Sally mentioned that she wanted to go there and see it someday, so I’m going to reconnoiter the place.

I have driven through the area twice recently and I actually visited it a long time ago. Back in 1989 Donna & me were deciding whether to quit our jobs in Florham Park and move to a sister plant in South Carolina or just stay in NJ and think about buying a house there. To help clear our heads and think on it we took a couple weeks of vacation and flew into Phoenix, AZ, rented a car and circumnavigated the state. One of the stops was Monument Valley. We arrived late afternoon and they were no longer running the Jeep tours, so we thought we were out of luck, but things were a bit more laid back then. The guy behind the counter handed us a map and said, “Just stay on the roads and be back here before 6 to leave, because they lock the gate.” We got back in our little red 1989 Ford Escort and bounced along on several miles of dirt road. That would never happen now.

Road Trip Day 5 – Paris to Amarillo

A 400-mile, 7 hour driving day that included an actual Dunkin’ store, a Cracker Barrel lunch, a mildly disappointing Buc-ees visit, an almost hotel mix-up and four bits of Roadside America.

Back in May of 2023 on Donna’s and my trip to the Napier’s Hometown we were in the Holiday Inn Express across the street from the Dunkin’ in the travel center. When I went in, I walked back out, because there was only one person behind the counter and too many people in line. This time it was me and Sally staying across the street in a Home2 Suites and I stayed because there were two employees behind the counter and no one in there but me. Turns out I probably should have left, they didn’t get the order right, regular means 3 cream – 3 sugar and all I got was 1 of each.

Cracker Barrel didn’t disappoint even though they didn’t have the Pot Roast dinner I wanted; the Sunday Special was chicken pot pie that put Swanson’s to shame. Sally’s trout was also excellent, but I had to take her word for it because she refused to share, (truth be told, she did offer and I declined.)

Turns out this Buc-ees did not have a car wash (aww..) and there were none of the free circle stickers either (crap!), but the rest was terribly weird as advertised.

I almost did the same thing I did once before on a previous trip with an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn property. While trying to follow the somewhat confusing frontage road situations in Texas I pulled into a Holiday Inn, and before I would have embarrassed myself, I checked the reservation on my phone and realized I was in the Holiday Inn lot and I needed to be on the other side of I-40 Business in the Holiday Inn Express.

We stopped at the Texas Best Smokehouse Travel Center in Henrietta, TX to photograph the Dinosaur Parade there. Next was a Quanah Parker Trail Arrow in the town of Quanah, TX. I was here before with Donna and even though I can find no reference to it the blog, I can say with all assurance that we were here on a previous trip because I remember visiting the museum that is in the same parking lot.

After checking in to the hotel, taking an hour to settle in, we went for a semi-long walk around the hotel area, we hopped in the car and grabbed a couple more Roadside America sites near Amarillo that I had never been to before, the giant Tex Randall Statue in Canyon, TX 20 miles south and the Giant Legs of Amarillo on the way back to the hotel.

Road Trip Day 2 – San Angelo to Houston

Yesterday evening while refining today’s route I found a bit of Roadside America in the the town of Lampasas. There was a park that offered a a spot for a short leg stretch walk and it included an art sculpture garden that included a old rusty pickup truck with a giant catfish in the bed. The giant catfish did not disappoint and there several other art pieces that were worth a few minutes of contemplation too.

About 2/3rds of the way into the day’s drive, we stopped for lunch. My first plan from the night before was for us to get some pizza or some Chinese food in the town of Temple. But I changed when I saw a sign for Zaxby’s just as we entered the town of Temple. I always enjoyed their chicken fingers while Donna and I lived South Carolina. Sally was agreeable to go there, so we plugged the restaurant into Google maps. I should have called an audible to find another spot because when we found it the parking lot was practically empty a 12:30 PM on a Saturday. It was disappointing on practically every level, the cole slaw was as I good as I remembered it and the frozen lemonade was pretty good too.

We had passed a drive through car wash on the way to lunch and thought it would be nice to wash the dirt off the car that we gathered on the snow-covered drive yesterday. While looking for maybe a different car wash that was more along our way out of town, I found out there was a Buc-ee’s in Temple. Originally the Buc-ee’s visit was slated for on the way home when we spent the night in Amarillo. Even though this would add several extra miles to the drive to Houston, who could refuse?

Heading Home

Day one of our 2-day return trip back to Klamath Falls. On the way up to Granite Falls we took the shorter quicker route through Washington by taking I-90 West and WA203 north, but on the way home today we abandoned that short quick version because the surface of I-90 was awful. I swear the concrete contractor took a few shortcuts because it is deteriorating badly. Of course the amount of traffic it receives is probably a whole heck of a lot more than the further north US2 too. From Monroe we used US2 this morning heading east and it was a great little drive until it got a little later in the morning and we got to the fake Bavarian town of Leavenworth, WA. Even after getting past Leavenworth, the traffic was fairly steady.

After the drive up, and now halfway back, we both think that this will be the last time we come up to visit over the 4th of July. We are going back to visiting in May when there are a lot fewer folks on the roads and practically zero RVs.

On the way up 3 days ago we crossed the Columbia river via a different bridge. We usually cross on US197 right out of The Dalles where the Holiday Inn Express is, but this time we used US97, about 20 miles further east. On the way up the hill in Washington we noticed a sign for a Stonehenge memorial and thought that maybe we should stop in on the way back. So we did.

Here is the interesting origin story of the monument.