Today is mañana.  I mean yesterday is mañana. No wait, today is yesterday’s mañana. Something like that.

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.  Several of them actually.  We turned a 200 mile drive from Santa Fe to Durango into a 350 mile drive by taking a detour to the Four Corners Monument.  It looks like this:

Not really, it looks like this:

The cononical photo is to put one limb in each state.  There is a line of people wanting to do so.  We skipped the line and grabbed the snap above between parties.  Visiting the Monument is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Because you only need to do it once…

Somewhere in New Mexico we crossed over the Continental Divide.  The countryside in the Southwest is amazing.  The distances are huge and the roads are not always great.  But you do see stuff like this…

… everywhere you go.  We never get tired of driving in the West.

We learned in school that mañana means tomorrow in Spanish.  But there is another meaning.

In Santa Fe mañana means eventually.  Eventually you will get your breakfast or your lunch or your dinner.  Or your Doppio Espresso con Panna with cold brew whip cream and Blond espresso.  And that’s ok.  Three days in Santa Fe leaves you pretty relaxed, if you let it.  And we let it.

Now it’s time to get back on the road.  From this point on it’s north and west at every stop.

 

Halfway by time, more than halfway by mileage.  We’re camped in Santa Fe for three days.  The weather is awesome, the hotel is great and it’s fun hanging out with family.

People in Santa Fe, and also the deep South we noticed, seem to take red lights as an advisory.  In one twenty-five minute stretch of driving today (day 14) we saw six cars run red lights.  You know that expression “If only there were a cop…”?  Well… yup, there was, he lit it and hit it and took down two red light runners on one of the main drags through town.  Loving it…

We had a leisurely car wash yesterday.  OK, the car had it.  They have car washes that look like ours; a tunnel the car goes through.  Only there are no machines.  They hand-wash your car.  They aren’t fast.  For some reason no one did anything for ten minutes or so.  We definitely have a different sense of urgency on the coasts.  The results were awesome.

On day 13 we had a mediocre dinner at the Ranch House.  It was Father’s Day; we saw a new father and new one month-old baby with matching Star Wars shirts.  Dad’s said “I am your Father” and the baby’s said, wait for it… “I am your Son.  Today (14) we had a very good dinner at La Choza.  Crazy spicy but very flavorful.

Santa Fe has it all — good car wash, good food, good weather, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and an entirely outdoor Starbucks.  What more can you ask for?

The car is big.  Not SUV big.  But bigger than it drives.  And drive it does.  It’s almost 900 miles from Kansas City to Santa Fe,  Yesterday, day 11, we covered just under half of that, like it was nothing.

Alabama and Mississippi are flat-ish.  Tennessee too.  Western Missouri, Eastern Kansas and Eastern Oklahoma are very green (in June anyway) with rolling hills.  Not what we expected, but nice driving.  Inside the car, seeing all that green, it’s hard to remember the outside temperature is around 100.  I guess things will turn brown soon enough.

We picked Weatherford, OK as the more-or-less halfway point.  We left late and got there earlier than we expected.  The town is right around the line when the land flattens out.

It turned out not to be the best choice.  The town is small, which is fine.  But that means the choice of hotels is limited.  Ours, the Fairfield Inn had bugs.  Not so fair after all.

Today things are much better.  We went from the worst hotel of the trip to the best.  And the drive was interesting.  We covered the rest of Oklahoma, the top part of Texas and a good bit of New Mexico.  It rained hard around the Texas / New Mexico border, which slowed us down.  The geography in Western Oklahoma is more like we expected; flatter and browner than the eastern side of the state.  That continued into Texas.  Once we got close to New Mexico, the terrain got interesting again.

The last 60 or so miles of the trip was on a state highway.  It was nice to get off the Interstate and into more interesting land.

We’ll hang out here in Santa Fe for a few days and then head north.  And west.

States so far:  GA, AL, MS, LA, TN, AR, MO, KS, OK, TX, NM

We had planned to go on at length about the rolling hills of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma.  But the Internet here at the Fairfield Inn in Weatherford, OK is so tragically slow, that we’re keeping it brief.

Today we had a little more of a plan than yesterday.  But we didn’t get much more done! The fun event for today is a baseball game at Kaufman Stadium.  We’ll see the Royals play the Cincinnati Reds.  We’re writing this post before the game.  So instead of a photo, we have an artist’s rendition of the view we expect to see from our seats.  We may be updating this tomorrow…

It’s hot everywhere.  And humid.  But we took a photo; so today happened.  We actually are chilling, staying with friends in Kansas City.  We had a nice breakfast, did some re-supply in Target, ate lunch in Whole Foods, went to Starbucks (of course) and didn’t plan any of it.

We did visit the Arabia Steamboat Museum.  The Arabia was a Missouri River steamboat that sank in 1856.  It carried 200 tons of cargo with it.  Over time the channel, and the whole river, moved quite a bit.  In 1987 two families of fathers and sons discovered it under a farmer’s field.  They spent about a million bucks excavating it and what remained of its cargo.  The cargo, that which had not washed away during the sinking, was remarkably well-preserved.  Anyway, blah, blah, blah, you can read the website if you like.

The most interesting thing, in the writer’s opinion, is this:  Civil War historians and buffs have long argued about various facets of life at the time.  Then these guys raised (or dug up) the boat and its cargo and settled lots of these questions.  For example, they found many pens, ink wells and lots of paper indicating the people of the time and region were better educated and more literate than thought.  So yeah, that.

As promised, a photo:

… “He was only here long enough for a cup of coffee.”  That was us with Arkansas.  We drove about 450 miles from Memphis to Kansas City.  That’s 1.55 Spokanes to you sir.  It was our longest day on the road so far. And the end of the first week.

So far so good.  The car is working well.  The humans are working well.  We’ve had a good mix of driving and not driving and just enough touristy stuff to make it vacationy but not too vacationy.

Anyway, back to Arkansas.  It’s between western Tennessee and western Missouri, so we kind-a had to go there.  We cut across on a diagonal and got… a cup of coffee of course. You definitely feel the geography change as you go from the deep South (mostly flat) to the Ozark Mountains.  We weren’t on many Interstates, so it was a slowish drive.

We’re 1,200 miles in, about a third.  States visited so far:  GA, AL, MS, LA (very briefly), TN, AR (passed through) and MO.  Soon the states get bigger…

No photos today, ’cause we didn’t take any.

 

Memphis is a musical town, so we’ll keep the references coming.  We’ve read that over 1,000 songs reference Memphis.  On any top 100 list of Memphis songs you’ll find Marc Cohn’s Walking in Memphis. So that’s what we did.  For a while anyway.  It’s 97 freaking degrees here.  And humid.  They say it’s raining back home.  And cool.  Sounds good right now!

We did find a great gluten-free breakfast place called Bedrock Market and Cafe.  We might have had the best waffles ever.  Or at least for a long time.  Cornbread waffles at home are pretty special.  Tomorow we need to get going early-ish, so we may try UberEats for the first time and have some waffles delivered to the hotel.  Or maybe we’ll just swing by there on the way out of town.

On our walkabout we saw the Gibson Guitar factory, an MLK memorial (there are several), Beale Street, the arena, the ballpark, Starbucks (of course) and the original Main street.  Then the heat sent us indoors again.

We had a small lunch at Whole Foods, because that’s exactly the sort of thing people from Seattle do.  And then dinner at Babalu.  It’s a Taco and Tapas place that started in Jackson, MS and is spreading out from there.  Delicious!

We spent last night, and will spend tonight, in the Peabody Hotel.  It’s a luxury hotel downtown.  It certainly has luxury prices.  The room is very nice, but no refrigerator (which we appreciate when we travel by car.)  The hotel is famous for their ducks.  Yeah, ducks.   But not to eat.  To watch.  They live on the roof.  Everyday at 11am they take the elevator down to the lobby and jump in the fountain where they frolic until 5pm.  Then they reverse the trip.  How do they push the elevator buttons you ask?  They don’t. They have a “Duckmaster” who guides them.  Really.  That’s a job.

People line up for thirty or so minutes to get a good spot to watch the ducks.  But you can check it out here.  We just saved you a trip to Memphis and about $450.  You’re welcome.

This map shows where we’ve been so far.

 

The car has exactly 800 miles on it; it had 19 when we started.  We’ve filled up once and will do so again tomorrow.  The tank is pretty big, about 23 gallons, and we’re getting about 22 MPG.  Once we hit 2,000 miles we can start to stretch it out.  Meaning revs over 4,500.  Meaning…

OK, one more Memphis song:  Memphis in the Meantime from John Hiatt.  See.  Him. Live.