A Tale of Two Road Trips

Our Thanksgiving travel this year was memorable. In many ways, it was really two trips. Trip #1 was the journey to Flagstaff, and it could not have gone better. We were on the road early, hit great weather, and, as George Costanza would say, we made “incredible time,” arriving in Flag a mere 16 hours after pulling out of Austin. (That’s an average of 75 miles per hour, counting stops for gas and meals.) The only negative aspect of the whole trip was terrible service at a Denny’s in New Mexico, where, by all accounts, I channeled a grumpy old man when our food was late (and cold—though, despite my crabbiness, I did leave a tip).

As they say, that was then, this is now. We set out on our return journey on Friday evening. The first leg of the trip was uneventful, although I’m fairly certain the guys hanging around the gas station in Gallup were high on something. By the time we reached Grants (about an hour outside of Albuquerque), it was turning fairly foggy and icy. We took a quick survey of the motels in town (during which we momentarily lost power steering on our rental car—always a fine experience) and settled on the Travelodge.

The next morning we made it most of the way through New Mexico before we saw any bad weather, but it was again turning fairly nasty by the time we hit the Texas border. There was an inch or two of snow on the ground in El Paso and it was still coming down, but the weather report I’d read the previous night led us to believe that things would clear up east of town. This was not the case. We hit heavy snow within 50 miles of El Paso and spent the next three hours averaging 35 miles an hour in a caravan of about 40 cars. Every once in a while some foolish person would pass the caravan and throw heavy showers of slush on each of our windshields, blinding us for several seconds until the wipers could clear it.

Our next scheduled stop was the booming metropolis of Fort Stockton, TX (population: 2900), where we had intended to gas up and move on. By the time we saw the exit, we knew we were going to stay the night; one false move by anyone in the caravan could have resulted in a pile-up. And visibility was getting worse as the sun set. So, we pulled into town, only to find the entire town dark. Plenty of motels and gas stations, but all of them were without electricity. There was about 4 inches of snow on the ground and we didn’t have enough gas to get to the next town. Mercifully, a Chevron station at the east end of town did have the lights on, so I hurriedly put gas in the car while Karla went inside to see about the motels in town. All of them were booked, except for the Rodeway Inn at the far east end of town, and we got one of the last rooms there. It was pretty ugly and the heater didn’t work very well, but we were just happy to have a place to sleep.

The next morning we made the remaining five hours to Austin without incident, but this will definitely go down as one of the more memorable road trips we’ve taken.