November 11/12/13

We had a very nice trip almost. It was pleasant enough across the crooked Y19, Y, and W then got a tad better down 54 but by I44 it was daylight. That and four lane road was where the where the enjoyment rose to a greater degree. It got even better driving across Oklahoma and their 75 MPH toll roads. Then came that stupid backward Texas with it's lousy 70 MPH speed limit....unless it's dark then It goes down to a measly 65 MPH. The ride was beginning to tell on us and poking across Texas didn't come at a very good time. Thank goodness we were able to scramble across before dark!

Into New Mexico, with their nice roads and 75 MPH speed limit, our sprits again began to lift, especially so when we didn't find the incumbent weather that had been forecast for that area.

We made it to Albuquerque, New Mexico around 7:00 P.M. and found a room for the night. That cost was only $36.20 total and it even had a TV. The weatherman on that TV told us to expect one or two inches of snow to accumulate on the area overnight. It looked to be a small band of bad weather so we went to bed knowing it wouldn't take us long to drive out of it the next day.

The next morning we were pleasantly surprised to discover no snow at all. We left there around 5:30 our time in very high spirits. That lasted for only about twenty minutes. If white is good and black is bad, about twelve miles out of Albuquerque we had a hell of a 110 mile two and a half hour ride experiencing the good and bad together! It is the blackest before the dawn and we were real deep into it when out of that black came the ugliest white stuff you would ever want to see. It had the roads and all the surrounding grounds deeply covered with the stuff in no time at all. When you can barely see beyond your nose and having all the road markings covered up, it is extremely hard to travel more than 20 or 30 miles per hour. When it started we were in a construction zone where the speed limit was limited to 45 MPH. In just a few minutes in we were unable to reach that speed again.

After the snow there was a strip of ice that we didn't know was. I thought that we might have a flat tire because of the way the car was handling so we stopped to check the tires only to discover the problem was with the road and it's covering of ice. The ice wasn't a real problem however and we were soon out of it to good seeable pavement and 75 MPH driving. We always assume the patrol will give us about a 4 MPH allowance so we actually set the cruise for 79 or 80 MPH. We did average 27.3 miles per gallon over the last 593 miles which included our snow and ice driving. Not too shabby for an old car with a big V8.