Road Trippin’ – Days 5 & 6 – It’s Nice To Go And It’s Nice To Come Home And One Minor Twinge Of Near-Regret

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22758 – 983

Here’s the haps:

The last full day of the trip and the rental car and we had only kind of a vague notion of what we wanted to do to get home. It was our original plan to go down to I-40 East and drive over to Albuquerque, NM then up I-25 North to home. We also discussed the idea of going back the way we came. TNT found that all the way into New Mexico there were extreme fire danger warnings and potential delays and long detours and reroutes to allow for firefighting. So we decided to go back the way we came.

The one regret I had was not missing Barringer Crater. I thought it sounded disappointing. No. Anyone who grew up listening to the radio the way I did in the early Seventies had heard of the town of Winslow, AZ. Later generations as well. I have a verse of a parody song I made up for the very moment. Little did I know that when I was looking at a map of the town to pick out a random corner to stand on that I would find a park, created by the town of Winslow in 1999, on the corner of W 2nd st (old Route 66) and N Kinsley Ave called Standin’ On The Corner Park which features a statue of a guy with a guitar. Occasionally, someone parks a red 1960 Ford Flatbed near the park. There is also a statue of the Eagles’ singer Glenn Frey. I knew none of this when I penned this classic verse:

We started out with the intention of going back via the exact same route but TNT had plugged in the route home via the best route and hadn’t plugged in any of my original stops. In this series of pictures, you can see where we transitioned into Colorado.

As the evening drew on I realized we were on the more direct, less interesting route. However, the weather began to change and I was becoming more and more glad for TNT’s error, beginning to understand that it was God’s divine providence that I wouldn’t be on a mountain road in a snowstorm. by the time we reached I-25 it was full-on blizzard snowing and we drove the 90 miles up the Interstate from Walsenburg, CO to home going about twenty miles per hour, tops.

When we got up the next morning the world looked like this and we realized we had been blessed.

Now I shall go back and answer comments and then I must be off to see what you’ve all been doing that I’ve missed in the wide wild world of WordPress.