Coast to Coast - Santa Fe, NM to Austin, TX

Needing a bit of a break from the road, the following morning we stuck around Santa Fe, taking Zoe to an off-leash trail head on the outskirts of the city and hiking up a ridge that offered panoramic views of the city and surrounding mountain ranges. We lunched at another patio restaurant, and took that time to plan our next leg of the journey.

It would take us 13 hours to get to Austin, and we knew that we didn't have that in us today. So we decided not to decide. We would just get in the car and drive as far as we felt like and then we would stop where ever we wanted and that would be that. It was kind of invigorating not to have a destination, we could go anywhere, do anything, and we wouldn't be veering off course because we didn't have one.

So, with that spirit in mind, we started the day with a detour to Galisteo, a small (and when I say small, I mean 13 mailboxs total small) town about 20 minutes of the highway from Santa Fe. The 'town' lay on the same plateau as Santa Fe, but far removed from the tree lines of the mountains. Here, it was just rolling open plains of sage brush and red earth.

The center was nothing more than a crossroads of the highway and a church with a few houses clustered around. Scattered residential plots with single homes and large barns where visible along the open horizon. But other than that, there was really nothing else. No stores, no restaurants, that was it. Why did we bother to stop here you ask? It was here, some 27 years ago, in a Tepee on one of these desert plains that Naomi Windblossom Coffman was born. What on earth her mother was doing here at that time I haven't a clue, and when I asked her she responded with "Well, Galisteo was really hip back then!" I don't know if that is the term I would use to describe it, but it was beautiful. Both stoic and timeless, and if you stood at those crossroads for 100 years I doubt much would change in the end of that time except the cars passing through.

After a few snapshots, we were back on the road, settling in to our familiar routine of drive, gas/coffee/switch seats, drive. Although I haven't wanted to say anything about it until now in the fear that I might somehow jinx it, Zoe, our feisty lab who usually whines if she has to be in the car for more than 20 minutes, has been absolutely amazing. When we head out the car in the morning, she jumps right up in the back seat and lies down in between the two front seats so she can get her share of the A/C. When we stop for gas or food, she hops out, relieves herself on any nearby grass and then hopes back up in the car and lies back down for the next leg. We couldn't believe it. And here we thought we were going to have to sedate her 3-4 times a day to get this desired effect. It made the drive that much more enjoyable.

Even with our little detours, we crossed over into Texas by mid-afternoon and were able to slingshot around Carlsbad Caverns by nightfall. The West Texas landscape was a dry deluge of broken limestone gullies and aired brush. It looked a bit like the Arizona desert, only with more vegetation and color. The air felt different too, where Arizona had been a dry heat, here the air was heavy and thick with moisture. We soon found out why.

As the last of the daylight reseeded back into the western sky, a huge pocket of black thunderheads loomed before us. As we drove straight into the storm, the wind began to push the car from one side of the road to the other. Lightening bolts crashed down at almost the exact same time as the ear-ringing thunder cracked through the darkening night sky. Then the rain came.

It was as if we were driving up a river. We slowed to 25 mph and had the windshield wipers going full blast but we still couldn't see past the constant stream of water coating the windshield. Sensing the tension, Zoe was standing, almost on the front dashboard, to figure out what was wrong.

Finally, we passed through the heart of it, and the rain subsided, but the thunder and lighting remained with us as we pulled into the highway outcrop of Sonora to find a hotel for the night, reminding us that nobody messes with Texas.

Coast to Coast - Santa Fe, NM

Though the temptation to stay in this frying pan of a homestead was almost too much to resist, we were on the road by 8:30 the next morning, Needles quickly fading out of site in our rear view mirror. We had a long drive ahead of us, 600 miles to Santa Fe, and we wanted to get there early enough to enjoy an evening out on the town. Luckily for us the speed limit on 1-40 was 75 (sometimes 80) miles an hour and it was a straight shot to New Mexico. We set the cruise control and popped in another book on tape.

We followed the highway, paralleling the famous Route 66, as it bisected the barren heart of Arizona; a seemingly endless expanse of flat, dry desert. It stretched on for hours, the only signs of life were the occasional cars that passed by or the sparse gas stations that popped up along the way.

Five hours in, we hit the New Mexico State line and the topography began to tansform before us– hills formed beneath us; trees and valleys dotted the horizon; and the earth, once a partched pale gray, was now glowing with an iron-rich red hue. The hills soon turned into mountains as we passed through Albuquerque and began to climb the tail of the southern Rockies.

Santa Fe itself sits atop a 7,200ft plateau but also makes up the basin of three large forested mountain ranges. A bustling metropolis of 75,000, it still manages to retain its wild west meets nomadic Indian outpost feel with strict adobe color and architecture building codes throughout the county and the over-abundance of Indian jewelry, clothing, and trinket shops throughout the city proper.

We pulled into town as the last of the suns rays slipped passed the encompassing mountains and twilight decended on the warm summer's sky. Having been cooped up in the car all day, we decided that we would bring Zoe with us and strolled along the brick-lined sidewalks into town. We heard music up ahead and followed the bluegrass tunes to a small tree-lined central plaza where hundreds of people were sitting around in the grass listening to a live country band on a stage in the center of the park. Children ran around in the fountain, hot food vendors lined the sidewalks, and near-by restaurants all had roof-top balconies filled with tourist and locals watching the show.

This scene seemed like it was a nightly occurrence in this town and Naomi and I were quick to fall in step with Santa Fe's the easy-going ebb and flow. We had a delicious tex-mex dinner in the courtyard of a local restuarant that allowed dogs and sipping maragritas and happy to be in a town where Denny's wasn't your only choice for food, entertiament and social interactions.

Coast to Coast – Photos

A few photos from the first couple days:







Dog is my co-pilot.











Standing on a corner... somewhere in Arizona.

The look Zoe gives me before she makes a brake for it.

Coast to Coast – The first leg

Heading south, down the spine of California, along the hot, black tarmac of 1-5, we tried to plan our route. We didn't have a particular destination in mind for the end of the day, only that we wanted to get as far as we could so we could pull into our real destination, Santa Fe, NM, sometime the following afternoon. It was a good plan, but alas it wasn't meant to be.

With a couple hundred before our next turn, we decided to kill a few listless hours with one of the books on tape our friends had given us for the trip. I have listen to books on tape a few times before and I think that, in my case anyway, it is entirely unsafe for highway travel. I get so caught up in the stories that I loose track of where I am and where I intend to go. Apparently, so does Naomi. We weren't even a few minutes into the tape, a James Patterson thriller, before we became so engrossed in the plot of who killed who for what, that we missed our exit, and the next dozen before we realized our error, and spent the better part of 2 hours getting back on track.

Needless to say, we didn't make it as far we would have liked for our first day on the road. In fact, we didn't even make it out of California, stopping instead at a small town right on CA/NV boarder called Needles. Oh yes, Needles.

Nothing more than a collection of mobile homes, a motel 6 and a Denny's, Needles is set in a dust bowl at the tail end of the Death Valley Desert plains where, upon our arrival at 11:30 at night, it was still almost 100 degrees and seemed to be heating up. While checking in, I asked the motel clerk, who looked like she'd seen a needle or two herself, what people did around here for fun. She looked at me as if she wasn't sure what the word fun meant.

"Uh, well," she finally offered, "there's a Denny's down the road, people go there sometimes."

As Bill Bryson as apt to do in this type of situation, I came up wit a couple slogans the town might want to consider in any new tourism ad campaigns :

Needles: because you'll want to prick yourself with one to make sure you still alive... and not in hell.

Needles: you want em', we got em'!

Needles: because Snaketown, Ghostville, or Monsterland doesn't quite invoke enough terror in visiting young children.

Feel free to add your own...

We got a late start. It was going to be a long day on the road and we had hoped to set out early, but after a huge good-bye bash the night before and an early breakfast with the family, both Naomi and I were a little bushy-eyed and bright-tailed and moving slower than normal. Zoe, our 5 yr old yellow lab perched in the backseat, was the only one that was jumping with anticipation. That didn't help either.

This was it. Our farewell to the Bay Area – for the next three years away. We took it all in as we made our way down the old Maple-lined avenues of North Berkeley toward the freeway; the bright cool morning breeze, the smell of fresh roasted coffee drifting in the air. I was really going to miss this place, and the people in it.

We pulled onto I-580 heading away from the Pacific, our destination: Savannah, Georgia, 3000 miles east along the Atlantic coast. We sat back, set the IPOD to 'song shuffle,' and prepared ourselves for the long journey ahead. The clouds in our head were beginning to lift as we hit I-5 and turned south toward Bakersfield and we started to perk up, even get a little excited, but not nearly as excited as Zoe, who was jumping from window to window in the back seat, she still thought we were taking her to the local beach.

I just can't wait...

to get on the road again. That’s right blogosphere, the Ramblin Schambelan (a.ka. the road warrior) is back on the asphalt and this time he’s keeping it local with a trip out America’s backdoor. San Francisco, California to Savannah, Georgia in less than a week.

The first leg = Berkeley, CA to Joshua Tree National Park, CA – with the girl and dog in toe, that should be good for a post or two…