Dallas, TX to Albuquerque, NM - 630 miles
The first leg of the trip was driving from Texas to California. We packed my luggage into MattW's already overloaded truck and trailer and hit the road around 8am CT.
60 miles into the drive, Matt noticed black smoke exuding from the rear of the pickup truck. Noooo!!! We pulled over and jumped out to investigate. As soon as I opened the door, the smell of burnt rubber invaded my senses. Not good, especially since we had another 1400+ miles to go. We unhooked the trailer and tried to diagnose the problem. Nothing looked out of the ordinary until I took a gander under the truck. The pickup truck had a spare tire bolted underneath, "had" being the operative word. Somehow, the tire had gotten loose and fell forward, got flipped under the truck and had been dragging underneath for who know how many miles. Matt pulled the truck forward, then backed up to flip the tire back but it's still hanging underneath the truck. Crawling underneath, he was able to loosen the bolt for the spare and pull it free. The tire had cable poking out from where it had been dragging on the ground. It was a gonner and we looked around for a place to dispose of the rubber mess. As luck would have it, we had pulled over right in front of a towing/auto repair place. What were the chances?
As much as I am NOT a fan of Texas, I have to admit I've yet to meet nicer people. The owner agreed to dispose of the tire for us and as we were hitching the trailer back up getting ready to leave, the owner came by with a brownie. But this was not just any ole brownie, no sirree! Apparently, there was a German bakery up the road a ways where they made mouth watering to-die-for pastries including the decadence called "Death by Chocolate" which he was holding out to us wrapped in a blue mechanics paper towel. He had a friend bring it all the way back for him from the dessert shop and insisted that we try it. How could we possibly refuse?
"Death by Chocolate" brownie
30 seconds later...I think there might be some crumbs left in between the seats because we couldn't reach them...
The rest of the drive was uneventful and very very flat. Once we entered New Mexico, the scenery became more interesting with beautiful mesas and rolling hills. We started climbing mountains and Matt's poor little 4 cylinder truck did it's best to chug along as we climbed to 6000 ft elevation. I don't think I've ever had this much trouble trying to maintain the speed limit. I was lucky if I was able to get up to 5 miles under the speed limit. Those hamsters were certainly being put to the test. Our destination was Albuquerque where one of Matt's college friends (Kelsey) was playing hostess. It was a 10 hour drive and made it in a little before 6pm MT.
We had dinner in town at Frontier Restaurant with Kelsey and another of Matt's friends, Irene. After some terrific Mexican food, a game of Clue (which I won) and a game of Cranium (which my team lost), I am toasting my feet by the fire with a very lovely glass of Riesling. Life is good...
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