Today we drove from Salt Lake City to Boise, where we have a home-away-from-home.  So we’re done with hotels for this trip.  All of the hotels on this trip were pretty good, even the ‘rustic’ hotel in Glacier National Park.

The drive from SLC to Boise is pretty long, about 430 miles but it went quickly.  We made good speed and took only short stops.  Like lots of other days, we made our own lunch from cold cuts we bought in the grocery store and gluten-free bread we got in Santa Fe.

When we got home we shopped and cooked-in.  Pretty nice after two weeks of eating out every meal, every day.  It will be nice to sleep in our own bed.

Best scenery of the trip so far, Durango to Salt Lake City.  Once you get into Utah and past a few small towns, you get into canyon-land.  And you see things like the above.  Or this:

And unfortunately like this:

Despite the above, it’s a great drive, highly recommended.  The best views are between Monticello (near Canyonlands National Park) and Moab and then from Moab to I-70 (near Arches National Park.)  Once you get to I-70 things are interesting but not spectacular.  Towards Provo you do go though some cool canyons, but eventually you hit I-15 and suburbia. 

It was hot all day.  When we shopped for groceries in Moab the temperature was 103.  We had planned to walk to dinner, about 1.6 miles round trip, but it was still over 100 at 7pm and we drove.

Overall the views rival those in Montana.  We definitely want to get Durango for a longer visit sometime.  We’ll almost surely add a few days to repeat this drive, but with long(er)  stops at some of the parks along the way.

Our car is fixed!  Well, more like our car is not broken anymore.  They really don’t know why it failed last week.  They can see diagnostics that say it did fail,  but there is nothing to explain why or why it works now.  They did find that the coolant for the electronics was low.  That could explain the issue. 

Anyway, we cannot say enough good things about Porsche of Albuquerque.  Last Friday they sent a truck and trailer up to Santa Fe with a (very nice and new Audi Q5) loaner car for us.  They took our car back to Albuquerque and ran diagnostics and tests on it all Friday and Saturday.  They cleaned it, which is ok; we usually let the dirt accumulate until we get home.  And in the end they didn’t charge us even a penny.  Great people!

Clean, gluten-free car

The gluten-free is a joke.  Sort-of.  We found a really nice bakery not far from the University of New Mexico.  We enjoyed lunch there and spent some time comparing New Mexico and Washington with the staff.

After that we stopped on the old Route 66 to take a photo.  In Red Robin they have walls of photos.  One of them is a street scene from the 1960’s.  A little Internet research led us to the exact intersection where the original photographer stood.  Here is our version:

From there we headed up US 550 toward Colorado.  We had not been too impressed with the scenery on the ride from Colorado to Santa Fe.  Things are much more impressive on the west side of the mountains.  There are more colors, more different shapes, more ridges, more layers, etc.  And 550 is a great road, two lanes in each direction for well over a hundred miles.  We never got stuck behind anyone.  🙂

As you get to Colorado things change dramatically.  The rivers have water in them.  There are trees!  We are in Durango, CO tonight.  It’s a great little town.  Very walk-able.  Touristy yes, but not like Jackson or Santa Fe.  We had a really nice dinner at Mutu’s Italian Kitchen.  Probably the best meal of the trip so far.   And good gluten-free pasta!

Hey that rhymes.  We got up, worked out, had breakfast, worked/read in the room, walked around downtown Santa Fe, met up with the relatives, bought some jewelry, sat on a bench, had dinner at a road house, got coffee and chilled out in the room watching a strange movie (Margaret) on HBO.

It sounds like a lot but it was slow and casual the whole day.  It’s been hot but today it was a little cooler.  Walking around wasn’t so uncomfortable.

Downtown Santa Fe looks a lot like downtown Jackson, WY.  A park-like square in the middle.  Lots, make that LOTS, of souvenir shops, theme restaurants, jewelry stores, classic cars and motorcycles that loop the square/plaza slowly, all sorts of musicians and other entertainers and about a bazillion tourists.  But we still had fun.  You can cover it all in about an hour.

We did see something unique later in the evening, an outdoor Starbucks.

That would be useless nine months of the year where we come from!

In 1939 several prominent European-born physicists living in the US, including Albert Einstein, drafted a letter warning that the Germans had the potential to develop a nuclear weapon.  This led to the hurry-up Manhattan Project which undertook to develop a nuclear bomb for the US.  The project was immense and comprised facilities across the country including many leading universities.

A critical part of the project took place at Los Alamos, just a bit north and west of Santa Fe.  The scientists there built and tested the first-ever atomic bomb.  The test was well over 200 miles from here.  The second and third bombs exploded over Japan.  The war bombs used different technologies and even different nuclear fuels.  It’s pretty amazing it all worked.

We spent the afternoon at two museums in Los Alamos.  The first was the Fuller Lodge.  It covers life in Los Alamos during the project.  Everything was top-secret of course.  Thousands of families lived there during the war, but their friends and families knew nothing of it.  They all had the same address; PO Box 1633, Santa Fe, NM.   The second was the Bradbury Science Museum.  It covers technical details of the project and the bombs.

We enjoyed both of these and the weather was a bit cooler up at Los Alamos than down in Santa Fe.  We also had dinner with relatives and got to bed relatively early.  Oh, and the gym at the hotel is great, so one of us got a workout in.

Ayer fuimos a un pequeño pueblo llamado Madrid.  Es entre Santa Fe y Albuquerque. 

¿Qué?  Es MAD-rid, no en Ma-DRID?  ¡ay

Yesterday we went to a small town called Madrid.  It’s between Santa Fe and Albuquerque.  They pronounce it MAD-rid, not Ma-DRID like the Spanish city.  In the late 1800’s it was a thriving mining town.  By 1970 it was a ghost town.  Now it’s a tourist trap.  Oh, sorry, it’s an ‘artist community’.

We had lunch in the ‘Mine Shaft’ and browsed some of the stores.  The movie Wild Hogs apparently concludes in Madrid.

We also did laundry at our relatives’ house and had our second Mexican dinner in two nights.  The Albuquerque Porsche dealer can’t figure out what’s wrong with our car.  We hope to know more by Monday.

It’s been blazing hot here but by late afternoon we had a thunderstorm.  That brought the temperatures way down and that felt great.

Laundry drying in the hotel room:

That’s ‘Mystery Diners’ on the TV.

Not much to report today.  We left Casper, WY and made it to Boulder, CO in good time.  It was a pretty short day, less than 300 miles.  Tomorrow is longer; we probably should have gone longer today and left less to do tomorrow.  But we wanted to stay in Boulder. 

We found a great burger place, Lark Burger, that really understands gluten-free.  And they have edamame as a side dish!  The hotel is great and they have a great workout room.  After dinner and a workout (we know, wrong order…) we went to a bakery called Boulder Baked that also understands gluten-free.  They are open only from 4pm to midnight, perfect for an after workout snack!

So, we got a workout, a GF dinner and a GF dessert and we’re staying in a very nice hotel.

Otherwise, the day was boring.  We made great time in Wyoming and really bad time in Colorado.  Traffic seemed to build the moment we crossed the border and then we hit a construction zone.  Traveling in the summer is nice, but a lot of these western states run their big roadwork projects then.  But, this is a first-world problem, so we’ll stop complaining now.

Overall the trip has been a blast.  We hit the eastern-most point we will hit.  It was a spot just north of Chugwater, WY.  It was good to see the car’s compass on the west side of ‘S’ for a change.

Tomorrow we head for Santa Fe, the halfway point and the focus of this trip.  We’re 1,710 miles in so far, more than a third of the miles in about a third of the days.

In bear country, you find garbage cans with special latches to keep bears out.

In no-bear country, you find garbage cans with lock to keep humans out.

We drove from Bozeman, MT to Casper, WY today.  That’s about 420 miles, all on the interstate.  I-90 to I-25 if you are keeping score at home.  We made great time leaving at 11am and getting in well before 6pm including all stops.  Even on its third road trip, the car continues to impress.   It eats miles like nothing else.  We averaged a, um, substantial rate of speed for the whole day and still got just over 24 MPG.

Not much else to say.  Montana is freaking huge.  We saw the geography change as we got closer to Wyoming.  We crossed over and actually overlapped our outbound route from last year.  One of the most impressive days last year was a trip through Bighorn National Forest in Wyoming.  Today we got to see that area from another angle.  Plus as we’ve noted before, things are very green this year whereas they were brown and dried out last year.

Tomorrow we head for Boulder, CO.  It will be a shorter day; we might have some time to hang out there.  And then onto Santa Fe!

Last year we drove from Seattle to Indianapolis and back.  We went east through Idaho to Wyoming and came back through Montana.  On that return trip we went from Havre to Great Falls and then through Lincoln to Missoula. 

Today we traveled from Glacier National Park to Bozeman and crossed over our route from last year.  Last year were went West on MT-200.  Today we traveled South on MT-287.

X marks the spot.  It was a good day of driving today.  We covered about 320 miles at a really good clip.  Montana has some great state highways and not a lot of traffic.  Most of the cars and RVs we saw were going the other way.  We stopped for groceries in Browning and coffee in Choteau. Choteau (‘sho-do’) is a cute little town with a very nice coffee shop called Meeting Grounds.

We also crossed our second continental divide on this trip.  Say what?  There is a point in Glacier National Park that is a triple continental divide.  You might remember from grade school that a continental divide is a point, more like a ridge, a really, really long ridge, that splits the direction that water flows.  Mainly we think of splitting east from west.  But in Glacier water will flow in three directions.  To one side water drains into the Columbia River system and flows to the Pacific.  You would think water going the other way would go into the Missouri system and flow into the Gulf of Mexico.  But actually, there is another divide.  When we left Glacier we were in an area where water flows into the St Lawrence River system and ultimately into Atlantic.  About an hour outside of the park we crossed into the Missouri system.

A bit later we crossed the actual Missouri River, twice.  So it was a day of crossings.  We also finally got Internet again and started catching up with the world.

Montana is one beautiful state.  We came through in late July last year and the land was brown and dry.  This year things are quite green.

We also found a new phone app for finding gluten free restaurants.  We tried the most highly rated restaurant in Bozeman.  The food was pretty good, but the service was slow.  And we saw the Bruins lose the Stanley Cup on the TV.  🙁

The hotel has a Precor EFX so we’re working out tomorrow and getting a later start than normal, but it will be worth it!

The Smugmug link is finally live.  And our photos are backed up on Dropbox.  What did we ever do without the Internet?