Days 16 to 18: Chili’n in Santa Fe

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Bill

They like their chilis in Sante Fe. Actually it’s the whole state. They have chili stands like we have Starbucks in Seattle. Sometimes you see trucks driving around full of dried chilis.

And they have Starbucks too!

We didn’t eat a lot of chilis but we did have some nice meals during our three full days in Santa Fe. It was warm and we were able to get tables outdoors for every meal. Breakfasts at Cafe Fina and Plaza Cafe Southside. Dinners at Cafe Fina, Andiamo, Harry’s Roadhouse and Gabriel’s. It’s been hot and the skies are very clear so the sun is strong. Hats are recommended! So is sun screen, but we managed to forget it every single time.

Andiamo was very pleasent. We sat under an awning and stayed dry while it rained. Then we had an amazing rainbow. The Italian food we had in Grand Junction was better, but the setting at Andiamo was great.

Most of these restaurants struggle to find enough employees to stay open seven days a week. The minimum tipped wage in New Mexico is $2.55/hour. Maybe that has something to do with it. Just sayin’…

We spent a fair amount of time with relatives. But we did find time to walk around downtown Santa Fe a few times including an hour wandering around a craft fair. We found some interesting, and portable(!), art for our house and for gifts for friends and family. The last time we were here we bought a table and had to have it shipped!

We like the Eldorado Hotel and Spa in downtown Santa Fe. Things are a bit different with the ongoing pandemic. New Mexico has a mask mandate but you wouldn’t know it from looking at most other guests. We’re looking forward to going back after the pandemic and feeling more casual and normal. And maybe use the Spa again.

Urgency is not something we typically associate with Santa Fe. Everything runs at its own pace. Posted store hours mostly happen. Sonner or later. We missed a favorite gluten free bakery because we got there at opening time and they weren’t anywhere to be seen. The Internet was out at one of the Starbucks; came to find out it went out in May and no one had fixed it.

Just the same, we enjoy Santa Fe quite a lot and will visit again and again.

Here’s a photo from downtown at sunset.

Day 15: Heading south

Posted on September 6, 2021September 8, 2021 by Bill

We drove from Boulder, CO to Santa Fe, NM today. Other than a lot of Labor Day traffic in CO, it was a really nice drive. Fast roads and great scenery. We did this drive about five years ago and everything was brown and dry. This year things were quite green. The rivers we passed had water in them. A lot of the country is in drought but it has obviously rained recently in southern CO and northern NM.

We stopped for lunch in Pueblo (Starbucks) and got gas. Two different things, not cause and effect!

Santa Fe is the southernmost point in our trip. We’re going to spend three full days here visiting with relatives and hanging out in town. We arrived just in time to catch sunset over their backyard. Good take out dinner from Cafe Fina too.

Miles driven	Time on the road
405	6:13

Day 14: That’s not Sprite

Posted on September 2, 2021 by Bill

“They say that the recipe for Sprite is lemon and lime, but I tried to make it at home, there’s more to it than that. ‘Hey, you want some more homemade Sprite, man?’ . . . ‘Not until you figure out what the **** else is in it!’” — Mitch Hedberg

We spent the day hanging out in Boulder. We like a breakfast restaurant called Snooze. It’s very popular. Even though we joined the waiting list on the app before we left the hotel, we still waited almost 50 minutes for an outside table. And yes, they have an app. It looks like we’ll have some Covid precautions for a while. They have no paper menus. You aim your cell phone camera at a QR code and the browser navigates to an online version of the menu.

The photo above is from the lobby of the Hotel Boulderado. It’s not too hot here, but it’s humid. So we had some of the ‘not Sprite’ after our walks during the day.

We spent a good amount of time walking around the Pearl Street Mall. About five blocks of Pearl street have been closed to car traffic for a long time. Since the start of the pandemic, they’ve closed off another three blocks to provide outdoor seating options for more restaurants. The mall has a lot of interesting street art, plenty of restaurants and food stands, coffee shops, boutiques, etc. We got some inspiration for our place but the thing I liked the best is unlikely to happen at our house. It’s a slab of rock about twenty feet high and eight by four at the bottom.

We sat for a while at a coffee shop until the rain came. Dinner was Lark Burger via Uber Eats. We’ll always recommend Lark, but Uber Eats has never really worked well for us. Twice the price for two times the wait and half the (food) warmth.

Later in the evening we took a walk on the mall and came across a street performer who has memorized all of the zip codes in the US. No one stumped him.

Off to Santa Fe tomorrow.

Day 13: Great Scenery All Day

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Bill

We raced a thnderstorm today. And won. But sort of lost because we rushed. One of the expected highlights of this trip was the drive over the Rocky Mountains. Interstate 70 through Colorado was the last section of the interstate system to be completed. Between the very high altitudes in the middle of the state to the deep canyons of the Colorado River, engineers faced their biggest challenges in completing the system.

Something we didn’t understand is the impact of rain in some of the canyons. In particular the road through Glenwood Canyon has been damaged by flash flooding and is frequently closed when it rains. And rain was in the forecast this AM. We left Grand Junction just before the rain started there and stayed ahead of it all the way to Boulder. We did stop for lunch in Vail and the lead edge of the storm passed overhead. But we outran it.

It’s an amazing drive! In the west you drive through huge rock formations that eventually narrow into tight canyons as you drive along the Colorado River. The canyon is so tight that they tiered the highway with the west bound lanes stacked over the east bound lanes. All in all it’s spectacular but we didn’t have time to stop for photos lest we get behind the storm and get caught behind the road closure. The detour adds many hours to the ride.

Just a house in Vail. Across from the Safeway. Colorado is amazing.

After Vail, if you are heading east, you hit the Eisenhower Tunnel. It’s the highest elevation along the route at just over 11,000 feet. It’s all downhill from there…

We’re in Boulder for two nights at the Hotel Boulderado. It’s conveniently located, historic, generally comfortable but technologically inconvenient (few outlets, small desk, slow wi-fi.) We ate at Hapa Sushi, an old favorite that happily survived the pandemic. The restaurants have taken over most of the pedestrian plaza along Pearl Street so we were able to eat out side. Boulder is quite walkable, we both hit 10K steps!

Miles driven	Time on the road
243	4:19

Day 12: Grand Junction Function

Posted on September 1, 2021September 1, 2021 by Bill

Yes it does…

Grand Junction is just over the Utah border on the west side of Colorado. We drove here from the Salt Lake City area, specifically Lehi, UT. It’s a short-ish drive, about four hours through some really spectacular scenery. The Wasatch Mountains run down the middle of the state. The road over them is smooth and fast and takes you through some amazing gorges.

Once through the mountains you see a lot of this:

It’s easy driving and the speed limit is 80. So, um, well, you know.

We arrived in Grand Junction in the mid-afternoon. It was hot and a bit muggy but we set out to explore downtown a bit. They have an extensive city art program called Art on the Corner. We liked a lot of it! It’s all over the map; here are two examples from the same intersection.

Naturally we searched for a credit union for dinner. (See Day 11.) Instead, we found an excellent Italian restaurant called Il Bistro Italiano. The owners have Celiac so we were very confident that gluten-free would be well handled. Try the Rosetta (if you are not gluten-free.)

We never would have thought about staying in Grand Junction. We did as a side effect of wanting to spend a day driving through Colorado from West to East. It turns out to be a nice place to visit. It has a walkable, historic downtown. Good food, good art. Lots of intersting shops. We likely will return.

Oh, and, the hotel, which is striclty mediocre, has one thing I’ve never seen before.

MIles driven	Time on the road
255	3:51

The pancakes are ok…

Day 11: Utah Community Credit Union

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Bill

Traveling during Covid is interesting. We’re not eating inside restaurants at this point, especially not in Idaho or Utah where community spread is wide. We generally make sandwiches for lunch and eat outside of some Starbucks or other. We also have camp chairs we can set up if we want to eat at a rest area or in a park or wherever. Dinner is going to be more interesting. We’ll look for places with outdoor seating or maybe do take out and go back to the hotel.

Today we drove from Boise to Lehi, UT. We’re headed for Boulder, CO. The shortest and quickest way is through southern Wyoming. Cutting across CO is far more interesting but longer. So we are breaking it up into three short days instead of two long ones. Tonight we’re in Lehi, then Grand Junction, CO for one night and then a day of driving through the CO mountains to end up in Bouder.

Why Lehi? It’s past Salt Lake City, so we bite the bullet on traffic in the afternoon instead of during the morning of the next day. And, it’s near… In-n-Out Burger! Normally we would eat inside, but see above. So we ordered at the drive-through and took our food to… where? Hmmm. American Fork, yes that’s the name of a town, appears to be paved top to bottom, side to side with strip malls. No obvious green space. So we picked a strip mall, found an empty parking area and ate by the UCCU sign. Better than any sunset. Well, no.

Who cares? We had Double-doubles!

MIles driven	Time on the road
366	5:03

Days 7 to 10: Boise, the city with no Covid

Posted on August 29, 2021 by Bill

No, not really. But you’d think so from watching people around town. Maybe a quarter of the people in the grocery store wear masks. The employees do. Mostly. And mostly properly. Restaurants are full. Theaters are open. It’s like the pandemic never happened.

Meanwhile, we wear our masks everywhere. We ate out on Saturday night, at Ruth’s Chris, but outside and even then we were a little nervous as the staff was not masked. We did have leftovers for dinner tonight!

On a more cheery note, we had a great time in Boise. We enjoyed the new park a half-block from our place. It’s called Cherie Buckner-Webb Park after woman who broke down many barriers in the Idaho legislature and has been a leader in the civil rights movement. The park has two particularly fun elements. One is Gentle Breeze, a massive, pink, metal tree. The leaves move with the wind; they have some kind of special hinge that lets them move freely.

Gentle Breeze in the Cherie Brucker-Webb Park

The second is a new, to Boise, coffee shop called Broadcast Coffee. We went three of four full days we were here. It’s really nice to sit in the park with coffee. Yesterday we saw a very large dog turn into a whimpering, quivering puddle of an animal sitting in his owner’s lap all because he was afraid of a three year old girl riding a scooter around the park.

The weather has been pleasent and our step counts are going up! We’re on the road four of the next five days, so step counts will drop again. 😒

The Capital City Public Market, a craft / food / art fair held in downtown Boise on Saturday mornings from April to October is finally back downtown. It’s previous location was restaurant row and has been taken over by outdoor dining. (So maybe some concessions to Covid were made.) But that means the market is right on the corner by our apartment. Convenient! We got some presents for friends and some small items for the yard and patio.

This was our fifth trip to Boise since the start of the pandemic. We had been coming here about once a month. Some of the things we used to do; eat in restaurants, sit in Starbucks, movies, shop, lots of in-person meetings, etc. are mostly off-limits for us at this point. We’re using our place more; spending more time inside, cooking more, etc. And we’re driving instead of flying. Looking forward, like everyone else, to getting back to normal…

At the grocery store, the check-out guy was rude, inaccurate and slow. I have to stop using those self-check outs!

Day 6: Mountain time (zone)

Posted on August 25, 2021 by Bill

Got to drop off the grandkids at Girl Scout camp and summer pre-school. The are very good at keeping their masks on. Then we headed for Boise. We can backtrack through Washington and Oregon (Spokane, Ritzville, Tri-Cities, Pendleton, Baker City, Ontario, Boise) for for about a hundred miles less, but about ten minutes longer we can drive down the west side of Idaho (Spokane, Lewiston, Grangerville, McCall, Boise.) We took the more scenic Idaho route. The views never disappoint. This is from a rest stop on 95:

That said, there are two significant construction projects along the way, so we’ll go back via the Interstates.

Dinner tonight at Tin Roof Tacos. Good food, cheap, open late and nice outdoor seating. OTOH their other location was closed fo Covid and staffing issues. So… there is that. Being from Washington State it’s a little confusing to be in a place where virtually no one wears a mask, not even the restaurant staff. The barista in Starbucks in McCall did have a face mask, but she wore it like a chin strap.

We’re hanging out here for four full days and then resuming the journey.

	Miles driven	Time on the road
	375	7:01

Days 2 to 5: Chillin’ in the hood

Posted on August 24, 2021 by Bill

No travel days recently. We’re just hanging out with the grandkids and thier parents. We had a nice breakfast picnic on Sunday. We got gluten-free waffles at People’s Waffles and ate at Riverfront Park. The carousel is nice, but we made our way to the Garbage Goat. No, really. They have a mechanised, vacuum powered trash eater in the park.

We met a man playing a handpan. He was kind enough to explain the instrument and play some for us. It looks like an inverted steel drum but has a similar sound.

The kids played on the red wagon slide. I’ve ordered one for our house. No, just kidding! But I do have ideas for a slide that wife and contactor are both trying to talk me out of. Mal sehen as they say in Deutschland.

So, all in all a mellow four days in Spokane. The M’s won twice. Got good food from Nudo and Kuni’s. (Still not eating in restaurants.) The weather is great, only a tiny bit smokey. Tomorrow we’re off to Boise.

If the adjective form of metal is metallic, what’s the equivalent for iron? Oh… how… ironic.

Day 1: On the road again. Finally.

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Bill

Ok, so we like to take a road trip every summer. And last year, well, you know, that thing happened. Not that things are all rosey again at the moment. But we’re on our way across a bunch of Western states for a few weeks. We have lots of masks, Lysol wipes and hand santizer and we plan to stay out of most indoor spaces. We will be staying in hotels for a total of eleven nights. We even bought some camp chairs so we can order take out and find nice places to sit outside and eat.

And of course testing… (Negative)

Day one was simple, from home to Spokane for several days with those little people, the um, um, granchildren! And their parents of course. Lots of traffic today. Apparently we were not the only people with this idea.

Miles driven	Time on the road
286	4:39