Just A Quickie

Oh, get your mind out of the gutter! I mean a quickie update on our travels. 😊

All good things must end, so we said goodbye to our daughter Tiffany and her family and left Show Low, Arizona on Tuesday morning, heading east on US Highway 60, through the twin towns of Pinetop-Lakeside and then onto the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation.

This area was our old stomping grounds before we became fulltime RVers, way back in 1999, and is the setting for my Big Lake mystery series. We stopped at the turnoff to Big Lake to pay our respects to Sheriff Jimmy, Robyn, and the rest of the folks who live there only in my imagination and my books.

When we got to Eagar we stopped at the Apache County Library to drop off some copies of the Big Lake series books. I had done the same in Show Low and Pinetop/Lakeside. They all already had several of them, but I was able to fill out the missing books in each of their collections. It’s always cool to see your books on the shelves at libraries and bookstores.

We stayed on US Highway 60, taking it east into New Mexico past the Very Large Array, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, used to explore outer space. Eventually, we reached Socorro and Interstate 25. We took it north to I-40 in Albuquerque, then followed 40 east to Santa Rosa, where we spent the night at the Best Western. It was an old-style motor court where you park right in front of your room, and the room itself was clean and comfortable.

We were on the road by 9:30 today (Wednesday) and drove an hour or so to Russell’s Travel Center, where we spent some time looking at their classic cars and had a late breakfast or early lunch. This place was so cool that I will be doing a blog post about it once we get back home and I have more time.

We drove in a heavy mist across Texas and into Oklahoma, with occasional short rain squalls. About 50 miles from Oklahoma City the sky opened up and it poured so much that traffic was down to 45 miles per hour. Eventually we made our way to the Hampton Inn in Midwest City, on the east side of the Oklahoma City metro area near Tinker Air Force Base.

We covered 435 miles on a dark, dreary day, and we were more than ready to get inside out of the rain. Saturday is our son Travis’ birthday, and we are 670 miles away from his house in Alabama. Hopefully, the bad weather is past us and we’ll have an easy trip there.

Thought For The Day – Don’t expect me to stop and help if you’re broke down on the side of the road. You had several opportunities to buy an extended warranty.