The Road Less Traveled

Matt here. Santa Fe was great! I really enjoyed the lunch (already well described by Annette) and Annette and I continue to rib Mike about how good of a meal he missed! My parents have been to Santa Fe a bunch of times and they always rave about how great the city is. I had always figured it was something akin to Sedona, AZ, which has a lot of neat little shops and such, but since I am not much of a shopper, I never really had an interest in going unless I was with my parents. Santa Fe is much, much more interesting! The shops are cool and have much more variety than the endless, identical, native american jewelery and such that Sedona (and most similar cities have). Instead, Santa Fe has a great setting and some interesting historical buildings (unfortunately, we only got to see the chapel Mike described due to time), I would definitely go back on my own time at some point.

The science museum and Los Alamos were very cool as well. Some good friends of the family used to work at Los Alamos many years ago, so I had heard a bunch about the city 3rd hand (ironically, these are the friends my parents are currently visiting in Oregon right now!).

We also had an aborted trip to Bandelier National Monument to see some old Pueblo ruins. Unfortunately, we only got about 0.2 miles into the trail when we felt rain and decided that the big storm on the horizon was a good reason to get back to the car and drive some of the distance to Moab.

Mike's Prius has a great navigation system that we have been using to get us to everywhere, which has saved tons of time pulling out maps and planning routes and such. However, like all electronic devices it is (a) subject to being mislead by bad information and (b) unable to apply common sense to certain situations. Factors (a) and (b) combined to put us on NM-126 (New Mexico state road 126).

We told the computer to take us from Los Alamos to Farmington, NM (a city about 110 miles from Los Alamos with lots of hotels), Part of the route took us over the continental divide and put us on small forest roads to get there. The scenery was beautiful as we climbed out of the last of the desert and into the mountains. Then we turned onto NM-126 from NM-4 (this level of detail is provided with those of you who have google maps open in another window). The first surprise came when we saw the sign that said "CAUTION: Unimproved mountain road" on NM-126. However, we were not worried as the road was paved and looked like any other two-lane road in the US. The second surprise came when Mike looked at the nav system and said "Interesting, I have never seen that color of road on the map before, I wonder what it means". That never-before-seen-color on Mike's nav system means "dirt road". Our paved Nm-126 became the very unpaved NM-126. This caused a bit of concern as a storm had just been through the area and the dirt was a bit wet. However, factor (a) now came into play as the nav showed the dirt road as only a mile or 2 long. Mike has put his Prius over a variety of dirt roads in Austin, and this one looked no different when we go to it, so we continued on through. The scenery continued to be beautiful, but it was starting to get later in the evening. Ultimately, the "short dirt road stretch" was actually 20+ miles of dirt road through open range graze lands (i.e. cows in the middle of the road), one-lane bridges, washboard and some mud. The entire 20+ miles we saw exactly _one_ other vehicle and only a few cabins. By the time we found pavement again, it was dark (as in the kind of dark you get when there are no lights but your headlights for 20 miles) and it had taken us over 1.5 hours to go 30 miles from Los Alamos to Cuba, NM. Note that our goal was Farmington, not Cuba. Cuba, NM, is _not_ exactly a tourist destination (I believe "spooky" was used several times), and the two zero star hotels in town indicated to us that we get the heck out of there and keep on to Farmington, NM (if you have never traveled the deserts of the southwest US you may have never seen what can pass for a "hotel" out here -- zero stars is a complimentary way to describe these places!). We stopped for gas and dinner, switched drivers and made it into Farmington, NM, at 10:30 pm after leaving Los Alamos at 5:30 pm. When we looked back over our route on google maps the next day, we realized that NM-126 _is_ the most direct route to Farmington, however, it's the only unpaved one! This is where factor (b) came into play. The nav system did not mention the unpaved portion in advance, and the nav system _is_ for a Prius, which, while a wonderful vehicle, is not a vehicle known for its off-road abilities and should have routed us on NM-4 and US 550 instead of NM-4 to NM-126.