Ken and Karen’s travel adventures
We left New Orleans, and headed for Florida. After 3 weeks, we have our eyes on home! It is 700 miles from here to home, so we tried to pick a place in-between to stay. Panama City seemed reasonable. So away we went! My only request was that we stop at Flora-Bama along the way for lunch. So, good-bye Louisiana, hello Mississippi.
And that didn’t last long, (about 75 miles) and we say hello to Alabama!
We’ve been to New Orleans a couple of times before. I knew we wanted to stay in the French Quarter, and I like the old historic buildings. So, we stayed at Place d’Armes on St. Ann, just one block from Café du Monde. 🙂 It was a neat conglomeration of old buildings around a central courtyard. Very similar to another place we had stayed years ago with a big group of friends prior to a cruise, called French Market Inn.
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It’s about 550 miles from San Antonio to New Orleans. Kenny was really feeling the need to breathe some ocean air, so we headed to Galveston to break up the trip. Unfortunately, there is no good way to get there without going through Houston. Boy, did we ever drive right through the middle of a crazy thunderstorm! This was certainly the most stressful freeway driving we went through on the whole trip!
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We did get a glimpse of downtown Houston before the sky fell on us. Read more
Headed south from Austin to San Antonio. It’s less than 100 miles. Along the way, we stopped at this cute little historic town called Gruene, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was Sunday, and there must have been a thousand people (I’m not even kidding!) there for lunch at the Gristmill River Restaurant. The restaurant spread out all over the place, inside and outside. There were lots of cute little boutique shops, but the highlight is Gruene Hall. It is a saloon and dancehall, in continuous operation since the 1800’s!
Heading south from NM to TX. Right off the bat, as soon as we cross the border, we lose another hour of time! DANG!. Texas is in the Central Time Zone.
The shortest route from Carlsbad NM to any sort of freeway in Texas is via Hwy 285. The truckers all know this, and this is where they all are… and all of their blown tire recaps. We are bumping along at the 75 or 80 mph speed limit on a road that needed to be repaved about 30 years ago. It is 105 degrees out. Really, it is that temperature! In a line of trucks. WHAM! We hit a blown tire recap in the middle of the road. %*@$#!!!! Pull over and try not to get hit by a truck. Whew! No flat tires. But, the front passenger side wheel-well cowling is buggered up. The driver/mechanic secures it as best he can. Start down the road and whap! A big ol’ chunk of cowling flies out. Pull over again, and watch behind us. Fortunately everyone steers around it, we back up and recover it. Put it in the back seat. Driver/mechanic once again does what he can to keep more parts from falling off, since we are a good 80 miles to anywhere. Welcome to Texas. There wasn’t even a sign anywhere to tell us Howdy y’all!, so I found this later.
This National Park is out in the middle of nowhere desertville.
The road in….
This is known as the “natural entrance” to the caverns. Read more
From Sedona, we headed out for a 600+ mile, 10 hour drive to southeast New Mexico! Moving on from crystals and vortexes in Sedona AZ to aluminum hats and aliens in Roswell NM.
This was one of the rest stops along the way. Good warnings for a little Pacific Northwest girl like me! And I saw some goofballs looking under the rocks! WHAAT?!
Cruising along I40, we took a little stop along the way Read more
From Tusayan (Grand Canyon), we drove south just about 100 miles to Sedona, AZ and stayed here one night. I had heard it was a beautiful place, so I put it in our itinerary. We got to go on another “squirrelyass” road! (the driver’s words). It was a very pretty drive through Oak Creek Canyon.
It was raining – which answered my question about how it could stay so green around here. The green against the rugged red rocks was beautiful! Read more
After Zion, we stayed in Kanab Utah, and drove to the Grand Canyon in the morning. Kanab is a little classic western looking town that has been the setting for many western movies. We found this fun local diner for dinner last night.
It wasn’t long before we said goodbye to Utah, and hello to Arizona. Read more
We got up in the dark, because our friends back home told us not to miss sunrise at Bryce Canyon. We were there in time, but Mr. Sunshine decided it was a day to stay covered up with blankets of clouds. I believe it would have been breathtaking! But not today, so we hiked in the nice cool morning.
The canyon is very colorful and amazing! Read more