West Trip 2012: Day 29

Albuquerque, New Mexico to Erick, Oklahoma

8 hours, 411 miles

Weather: 72 day, 56 night

While in Albuquerque, one of our goals was to try some New Mexican food. Evidently, Albuquerque is the only city in the U.S. with an official question, “Red or Green?” This refers to your choice of chilies-red chilies or green chilies for the sauce on your food. We went to a restaurant near downtown called Garcia’s Kitchen, where they serve breakfast anytime, as well as lunch and dinner. The décor was clearly New Mexican-flags, murals, reds greens and white, paper decorations-and the stacks of plates in the kitchen were so colorful. The waitresses wore Spanish looking blouses-bright colors with black lace trim-it was a fun place to be in just from the looks of it. Dennis, Eric and I all ordered their breakfast burrito-the boys with green chili sauce, and myself with the red, and a side of sliced avocado. Bay and Leah both ordered the hotcakes. The food was good-not the best ever-but certainly worth it, and for $5 a plate we got out of there pretty cheap for a family of five!

After breakfast, we headed south of the city to a suburb named Los Lunes, where my dad has a piece of property he bought many years ago. It is just a plot in a planned subdivision out in the desert, but since no one in the family has ever actually seen it, and we were relatively close, we took the drive out there. It was about an hour drive-not so many miles, but once we got off the main road, we had about 10 miles of gravel to go down through the desert to get to his plot. The property backs right up to the foot of the Manzano Mountains, and a National Forest, which was a very nice view anyways! We took some pictures of the surrounding land, some with the kids, and then drove back towards town.

Our next plan was to take the Rail Runner, Albuquerque’s rapid transit train on its route north to Santa Fe, just to see the scenery along the way and to possibly explore Santa Fe a little. When we got to the train station at noon and looked at the schedule we saw that the train is solely a commuter train-it only runs first thing in the morning, and then the early evening. We would have had to wait 4 hours for the next train-so we ditched that plan! Nearby was a disc golf course we had looked up, so we drove over to it to see about playing a round of golf. When we got there, the course was certainly interesting-completely in the desert. We might have considered playing if we all had been wearing long jeans and boots-it was most definitely rattlesnake territory!

Since all of our plans were not panning out, we decide to go back to the RV, close it all up and get on the road heading toward our next destination, Tulsa. We originally planned on doing it all in one day (Saturday)-lots of miles, but figured we’d break it up into two days and it wouldn’t be so much.

We packed up in 30 minutes, fed the kids lunch, and were on our way by 2:00 pm! We had already paid for 2 nights, and there are no refunds, but losing the $25 in camping fees was not too big of a deal since we knew we would camp for free tonight by just stopping at a rest area.

The drive out of Albuquerque was fairly uneventful. There were a few pretty heavy rain showers we drove through-the first time on our trip driving in the rain-but none lasted more than a few minutes. We stopped around dinner time for gas, and pulled into a parking spot to make a quick dinner of sloppy joes and sweet potato fries. Every time we stop like this to eat, I am reminded how nice it has been to have the RV to travel in. Meals are so easy-we can cook, eat and clean up and get moving on the road again in such a short period of time! Besides the obvious fact of saving money, there is such a satisfaction in eating a home-cooked meal while on the road. I am continually thankful!

Eventually the land flattened out as we headed east toward Texas.

When we entered Texas we set our clocks ahead one hour to Central time-it was still a bit light out at almost 9 pm! The majority of the drive across Texas (through Amarillo) was in the dark. We got into Oklahoma and stopped at a rest stop in the town of Erick! Eric thought that was pretty cool. This rest area is very crowded tonight-we got the LAST parking spot-there are probably 30 semi’s here! God provides continually on our trip for us.