Day 29: Eagle CO - Fort Larrington

So I went back to the tyre place.  Nice Lady from last night not there.  Other Nice Lady summoned up a spannerman who, in the manner of spannermen the world over, sucked his teeth and said "Werrrl, maybe this afternoon".  Bother.

I was about to depart when Other Nice Lady came rushing out and said "Try the airport.  They have rental cars and maybe your lot will have an operation there".  After recovering from the shock occasioned by learning the there was enough flat ground anywhere between Denver and Glenwood Springs to build an airport big enough to support rental car agencies (plural) I did as she suggested and Lo! there was an Avis desk!  On explaining my sorry tale of woe to Nice Avis Lady she bade me fetch The Luggage, fill in a form and leave the ASBO in her tender care while I made good my return to Denver in this:

Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  Ride my...

Is it a Kia?  Is it a Hyundai?  Is it even, perchance, an Audi or yet a Pikey Old Beemer?  Why, no!  No, it is not.  'tis a Chevrolet Malibu, the automotive equivalent of a fridge.  It goes "BONG" even more than most USAnian cars.  The only thing it did better than the ASBO was not to muck about with GraceNote for album art and instead just use the embedded tag in the .mp3 file, thus correctly portraying Wilko as a guitar-slinging crazy and not some mini-skirted bimbo.  No-one would want to see the real Wilko in a mini-skirt.  Or if they would, I'll thank them to cease reading the Automatic Diary and never return.

The Chevy Beko took me east along I-70 again and so busy was I internally railing against the architects who do ski resorts while passing Vail that I missed the turning for Loveland Pass completely and had to go through the Eisenhower Tunnel and then double back.  This part of Colorado has been getting Weather, and thus the summit was well above the cloudbase, which wasn't preventing motorised morons from stooging up and down the pass with no lights on.

Ski resorts, yes.  There are two kinds of people who design ski resorts, viz.

1. One who've seen one single picture of St Moritz, and
2. Stalin

Vail and Aspen are the former but there are plenty of the latter on display every time the Tour de France has a mountain-top finish.

I went back over Guanella Pass next, where it was SNOing.  Rather glad it wasn't like this:

SNO, Colorado, Wednesday

when I was rolling around on the floor wrestling with the ASBO's spare wheel.  Then down to the parkland beyond Kenosha Pass - "Parkland" in Colorado being what the rest of us call "Flat stuff with cows. On it."  Park County Road 77 turned ot to be a Thing of Beauty but in spite of being a lot shorter than the route I planned originally, still left me chewing my nails that I'd get the Chevy Smeg back to Denver in time.  One day I'll learn how to budget final-day miles properly, though I did make it with thirty minutes to spare and the Avis chap batted nary an eyelid at turning up in a Chevy Hotpoint instead of a bellowing red monster covered in muck.

Hurrah: I have a seat with extra legroom!
Bah: Next to a child with lungs like unto a brace of foghorns.

But BRITAIN was still where I left it.  LHR Terminal 3 means a long walk to the bus stop chiz and I still have the M25 to look forward to tomorrow.  I don't propose to mention that or, indeed, anything else for this year's gripping, nay, riveting Automatic Diary, so here to tide you over until next time is a bridge:

Day 28: Eagle And The Surrounding Spaces, CO

Today did not start well, because the imbeciles at Lloyds bloody Bank decided to send me a text at three o'clock in the morning to tell me that my debit card expires shortly.  I know this, Mr Lloyd, because it's got "EXPIRES END 09/17" written on it.  And you know that I'm in USAnia at the moment, because:

1. I told you, and
2. You've sent me a couple of texts to tell me said debit card has been used in an ATM.  In USAnia.

Idiots.

What to do with my copious free time today, eh?  Let us visit the summit of the Guanella Pass, as not visited in 2011 because it was only fully-paved in 2015.  Crawl through the roadworks on I-70 and up through Frisco and Breckenridge (where I bough my bass-player-inna-stoner-rock-band sunglasses) and up the Hoosier Pass.  Pause for phag and photos.

I think this is Mount Lincoln.  He's gone grey.

"BONG" says the ASBO, even more insistently than usual, "BONG, you have a squishy tyre".  I twiddle the buttons.  Left front at 23 psi.  Should be 33.  Arse.  Nurse the thing down to Fairplay and add more air in the faintly ridiculous hope that it was just some kind of aberration and press on to the top of the Guanella.

Guanella Pass

Junior Pocket Microscope (model 3a) will shew an altitude of 11,669 feet.  A perfect spot for wrestling with jacks and wheels.

By which time the thing is going "BONG" again.  Only thing to do is bung the spare on.  This takes quite a long time, because everything does at that altitude if you are a worthless slob.  Emily does not know about things like tire (sic) repair places, but Sarah...  Sarah does.  They are all in Denver.  I do not want to go to Denver today because it is in the wrong direction.  Bugger.

Crawl down the north side of the pass to Georgetown

Georgetown.  Very picturesque and utterly devoid of tire (sic) repair outfits

and get onto I-70 westbound.  The spare says "50 mph max".  Thus I am forced to do about 75 miles with the hazard lights on, including traversing the Eisenhower Tunnel and Vail Pass, to get back here.  Find the address of a tire (sic) repair place which apparently closes at six.  "No", says the Nice Lady, "we close at five and it is now ten past.  We are open again at eight."

So that's my plans for tomorrow morning - leisurely breakfast, redistribute Teetering Piles of Crap™ around The Luggage and take a scenic route back to Denver - scuppered.  I just hope they actually can fix it, as it is 150 miles from here to there and the prospect of doing that at 50 mph is too horrible to contemplate...

The ASBO pretending it's done nothing wrong, Dillon Lake

Day 27: Farmington NM - Eagle CO

Yoicks, that was longer than I, and Mr Google, had anticipated.  Especially since Emily has apparently forgotten about the existence of US-24 north of Leadville and sent me off up CO-91 instead, adding twenty miles to the trip.

Rewind.  The first thing on the anbaric distascope at breakfast time was Pretty Weather Lady standing in front of a map that looked like it had been reworked by Jackson Pollock.  Closer inspection shewed that the unpleasantness was all around a line from Santa Fe through Albuquerque, Roswell and Carlsbad i.e. right where I got flooded three years ago.  And over Farmington was a circle with the number "26" written in it, which I took to mean "about -3 Celsius".  By the time I actually got moving, though, it was a balmy 6.  But the sunshine prevailed all day, in spite of the increasingly ominous-looking clouds building up to the east in the afternoon.

Weather, Colorado, Monday

First and, in fact, only port of call today lay some forty miles south of Farmington which, if you are following these perambulations on a Proper Map, you will note is in the opposite direction from, well, Colorado.  That's because that's where the New Mexicans keep the Bisti Wilderness.  In a previous life it was a river's delta but that was about 70 million years ago and what's left is a bewildering variety of landscape formations that I, lacking time, fitness and sensible footwear, could only nibble at the edges of.  Probably inhabited by Carkers too, as featured in Anthony Boucher's short story "They Bite", which was dead scary when I read it as an impressionable nine year old and still creates a certain frisson today.

This stuff has the texture and consistency of crumble and is probably not meant to be climbed on.  Oh...

It's remote enough from any main road that I found myself getting unreasonably cross with the git who inconsiderately flew his light aircraft overhead and it gets much more odd further in.  Watch William Friedkin's 1977 film "Sorceror" for more.  Of it.  Though why he chose to film Roy Scheider going a bit bonkers in this spot when the rest of the film was shot in the very wet rain forests of the Dominican Republic is a bit of a mystery.

Picture shamelessly robbed from that The Internet, that they have now.

After that it was a choice.  US-550 over the Coal Bank, Molas and Red Mountain passes and the Grand Mesa to I-70, or US-160 over the Wolf Creek Pass, up the San Luis Valley and over the Poncha and Tennessee passes to the interstate instead.  The latter won, because:

1. Every time I've been up the 550 it's been full of roadworks, weather or both, and
2. The section from Ridgway to Delta is soporifically dull, and
3. Pretty Weather Lady said they'd already started the skiing season at or near Silverton

So, abandon the 550 at Durango and turn right.

Sign still there!

This chap rode up, stopped to put on his jacket and set off back the way he'd come.  Nutter.

Though before even getting that far the lofty peaks of the Mighty Rockies could be seen, in parts at least, to be capped with SNO.

Nearly all this bit was familiar from previous trips - I stayed there, I bought "gas" here, oh, I remember this place now it's where the turn-off for $PASS is and, about two blocks from the hotel, I bought a Dirty Pizza from that place which is now a mobile phone shop.  I am actually spending two nights here in Eagle, if I am not electrocuted utterly to DETH before then, as the carpets in this place generate such copious quantities of stat that sparks fly from my fingertip every time I summon the lift to go outside for a fag.  Or I get buried under some more of this:

Up close and personal with the SNO near Clinton Creek Reservoir

Day 26: Deming NM - Farmington NM

Sunday.  Opposite of Saturday in that it was a climb back to higher altitudes from the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico.  Only without all the drama of US-191.  US-180 runs dead straight nearly all the way to Silver City and the only thing worthy of note was this rather silly sign in a rest area:

The views did improve for a while after Silver City, but were nothing like as fab and groovy as wot yesterday's were.  Far fewer trees and lots more roadkill.  Though there was a nice lay-by somewhere up in the hills.

I expect much the same is true for the dismembered parts of the victims of local murderers.

In the pines / In the pines / Where the sun / Don't ever shine, er,oh...

And once the Plains were reached, they were very far from Scorching™ chiz.  And they got even more dull after Gallup, at least until the inselbergs, monadnocks or, as it were, kopjes started to appear.  There's a fair few of these dotted around the desert north of Gallup.  Most of them look a bit like this:

though there's one very oblong one.

Don't look round the back, though, coz it's all held up with wooden props¹

And one very big one:

This is as close as you get, paleface...

This latter is Tsé Bitʼaʼí, "rock with wings" or "winged rock" to the Navajo, or "Shiprock" to the incomers.  It stands about 500 meters above the surrounding non-Scorching Plain™ and this is about as close as you can get if you are neither a Navajo nor a git.  It's sort of like Uluru in that it's terribly sacred to the Navajo, and because it's on private land they are at liberty to tell would-be visitors to git orff it.  Now that's irony.  Over to the west is this rock:

which, as you can see, has a hole.  In it.  I did not investigate this one any further, partly because I think it's actually in Arizona and thus would have confused Sarah the SatNav's clock even more, but mostly because Farmington lies in the opposite direction and I'd already done 400 miles by the time I got there.

Sorry, that was all incredibly dull, wasn't it?  Though I think I heard the bass riff from Lawnmower Deth's "Spook Perv Happenings In The Snooker Hall" being used in a Toyota advertising-announcement in the pizza place this evening.

1. Alternative fact

Day 25: Eagar AZ - Deming NM

Saturday: short on distance but long on scenery, at least once I'd managed to persuade Emily to take me that way.  This involves a lot of picking places on the map and entering them into her tiny head-branes as "Via Points", then repeating the process when it transpires she's never heard of for e.g. Franklin AZ.  This is not any great surprise, in fact, as I'm not entirely sure Franklin AZ has even heard of itself.

This corner of Arizona appears to be largely populated by pickup trucks with no number plates and blokes wearing camouflage.  They probably wear it to church too.  In one wide place in the road there was even a Confederate flag flying next to that of Arizona.  Two things:

1. The Confederates lost.  Get over it.
2. Arizona wasn't even a state until 1912.

Anyway, US-191 leaves Eagar at about 2200 metres and climbs to around 2850 before, one would think, plummeting off the Mogollon Rim and down to the flatlands that stretch all the way west to the Mighty Colorado.  And all the way east to the Mighty Rio Grande, since the Continental Divide is around here somewhere (though it's just a tacky "trading post" and a very small rise in I-10).  It doesn't, though because after a while it gets bored with the frankly overrated business of descending and goes up again, and so on.  Still, it is rather scenic in those parts.

US-191, being Scenic

Looking south-east from Blue Vista

It's also the Coronado Trail, named for legendary Conquistaberk Francisco Vasquez de Coronado who came this way in search of the fabled “Seven Cities of Cibola” which, natch, did not exist.  Although The Trashcan Man in Stephen King's "The Stand" did - aptly - apply the name "Cibola" to Las Vegas.  Still, you have to wonder whether some second-rate Spanish idiot was worth building a road like this for - apparently connecting nowhere to nowhere and having an alternative which gets you there quicker.  Then you come round a corner and wonder whether this

might have anything to do with it.  The answer is probably "no", because you've already passed this sign:

Translation: all switches, buttons and levers into ASBO mode

which renders it highly improbable.  The gert big hole in the ground is the Morenci Mine, the end product of which is mostly copper.  And I could quite cheerfully have stayed up there for hours watching the big lorries:

Note full-size pickup at left for indication of Bigness

doing their thing.  They appear to be Caterpillar 793s, which have about 2000 horsepowers and weigh about 375 tonnes when fully-loaded, and if you want one, a 22 year-old used one will set you back about 2.65 million dollars.  Which I doubt includes delivery.

Wheel and tyre approximately two Mr Larrington-heights in diameter

At the other end of the mine lies Morenci, and at the other end of Morenci lies Clifton, where someone in the old railway station was playing "You're The One That I Want", from the "Grease" OST.  Which obviously put me in mind of the hilariously awful dance video featuring Mr & Mrs Crazy P Sagan that emerged around the time of the 2016 Tour de France.  No, I'm not going to link to it.  That's what search engines are for and besides, this laptop has to cross an international border next week and I don't have time fully to disinfect it.

After Clifton you cross in New Mexico and the scenery takes a dramatic turn for the Flat.  Onto I-10 at Lordsburg - which looks so down-at-heel that I think the Lord may actually have forsaken it altogether - and across the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico.

Scorching Plain™, Mew Mexico, Saturday

Bethany (8)1:	So, were they actually Scorching this time?
Mr Larrington:	Yes. Yes, they were. I just went out for milk and it was still 30 degrees at seven in the evening.
Bethany (8):	About bloody time!
Bethany's Mum:	Bef'ny! 'oo you torkin' too?
Bethany (8):	No-one, Mum! Just that bloke from P@nd3m1c Pr0duckt10nz™®.
Bethany's Mum:	Wot did I tell you abaht torkin' to nutters?
	FX: Slap
Bethany (8):	Owwwwww! I'm gettin' TV's Super D Millar onto you, you fukn C-O-W!
Bethany's Mum:	I 'eard that!

Note for non-readers of YACF: Bethany (7) wrote to the Commissaires requesting that Crazy P Sagan not be thrown off the 2017 Tour after that incident with Cav.  The rest of it is made up.

1. It was her birthday the other week²
2. Lie

Day 24: Flagstaff AZ - Eagar AZ

The three phases of life on the road, shamelessly plagiarised from Douglas Adams:

1. Survival - Where am I?
2. Inquiry - What time is it?
3. Sophistication - Where's the bathroom?

Don't worry, I found it...

First port of call requires a retrace up US-89 to Sunset Crater.  I mean, it'd be rude not to.

Lenox Crater Trail, described as "Strenuous" and surfaced with volcanic grot to deter unfit dilettantes in flip-flops.  It worked...

Lava, Arizona, Friday

It last erupted shortly after the Domesday Book; the sight of steam emerging from da 'hood in 2015 sparked fears of a new eruption but turned out to be a forest fire.  Whoopsie.

Weather brewing to the south.  It missed.

Sunset Crater National Monument is joined at the hip to Wupatki National Monument, which contains a Several of Native American pueblos dating back to some time before Magna Carta.  Looking at them, you'd think one decent shower would have them dissolving back into the desert almost immediately but the lads who built them clearly knew what they were about.  Eventually most of their descendants got wiped out by the usual suspects including, though not limited to, Jesuits, smallpox, whiskey and the US Government who told the locals no, you can't live round here coz it's OURS.  In 1970.  I know Nixon was president back then but even so.

Wukoki Pueblo

Wupatki Pueblo

Iz mah bukkit!  Probably not an original feature of the site.

Back into Flagstaff, a quick burst of I-40 and I-17 then off down AZ-89, or what's left of it while they're apparently rebuilding it from the ground up, to Sedona.  This leads down Oak Creek Canyon, which is jolly brillsticks even if you have to follow some Grade-A nincompoop from Louisiana who comes almost to a standstill on every corner.  Yes, they're trees.  You have them in Louisiana too.  I've seen them.  Now hoppit.

Hullo clouds, hullo sky, hullo,trees!

Being as it is not very far at all from Route 66, Sedona gets hyped to bits in the guidebooks so natch I feared the worst.  On the Mr Larrington Nastiness Scale, where 1 is Le Puy en Velais and 10 is Aspen, it rates about 7, but gets an extra half-point for the naff faux-pueblo "architecture" that infests everywhere from west Texas to the Mighty Colorado on the California state line.  Just stop it.  Emily wanted to send me back the way I'd come to get to Eagar, but I told her "no" and was rewarded by some excellent Rocks south of Sedona.

Finally she relented and allowed as how AZ-260 might indeed take me to within a mile or two of my destination.  The 260 can't make up its minds whether it wants to be up on the plateau or down in the valley, hence the temperature is never constant for more than two minutes, but if you ever wondered what Douglas Bader did after being liberated from Colditz, the answer can be found just outside the town of Strawberry.

Finally the road settles on "plateau" which in these parts is high enough to be thickly coated with Ponderosa pines.  Until just beyond Show Low, where it turns into "undulating grassland that looks like some of the bits of Montana I crossed the other week".  I happened upon some kind of Motor-Car Happening in Show Low; one lane was cordoned off to allow a procession of hot rods and muscle cars, with a few oddities thrown in.  Loudest was this 427 Cobra:

Sorry for the rubbish photo; he was doing right-on-red while I was stopped at the lights

Some of the onlookers even waved at me so natch I had to wave back, in the approved BRITISH manner as practiced by HM the Queen.

(Grams: "Rule Britannia" inna-Last-Night-Of-The-Proms-stylee)

Day 23: Henderson NV - Flagstaff AZ

Today's entry is brought to you by the word "wind".  W-I-N-D.  Wind.  It was windy.  Just like yesterday, only more so.  This is probably the reason why Las Vegas was actually visible, because the wind had blown the usual cloud of brown ozard somewhere else.  A truck driver I chatted to just now says it was the same right across Texas too.  But anyway...

The hotel in Henderson operates an "Express Checkout Service", which is to say they bung the receipt under the door and you can leave the keys in the room and bugger off.  They didn't mention that along with the receipt there would be a half-eaten choc-chip cookie, but perhaps that's a Special Service they only offer to Gold Rewards members.  Anyway, what could be lurking behind this door?

Who lives in a house like theeees?

I like to believe it's a demon of some kind but, more prosaically, think it more likely to be the air-con.

So the morning was not as stinking hot as yesterday, though just as windy, and I was blown to the Lake Mead National Recreation Area where, chiz curses, there was someone on the gate to take my money, unlike 2014.  Karma, or something.  And I didn't even want to go there but the alternative was to go back towards Las Vegas, which was full of traffic and wind.  Off the Lake Mead NRA, y'see, lies the Valley of Fire State Park, past whose entrance I had foolishly driven on the way to the Hover Hoover Dam three years ago without even noticing its presence.  As the name suggests, it is full of red rocks, and wind.

Also this feathered ruffian who, mercifully, was too intent on scoffing an apple core to try robbing my bag like his cousins in Canyonlands did that time.

Nom nom nom!

Also the French couple, driving this:

They almost got into the ASBO by accident.  At least I think it was an accident.  Better timing might have seen me heading off into the distance with a new and elegant blonde companion on whom to practice my French, while her swarthy companion remained behind to rail at the Perfidy of Albion.  That's twice on this trip that poor timing has seen the ASBO's passenger seat not graced by an elegant blonde.  Bah!

I could have gotten to Flagstaff much quicker had I retraced my path and gone down US-93 past the Hover Hoover Dam, but where's the fun in that?  Instead I took off north, briefly into Utah, then across the Arizona Strip.  It's all very sagebrush and red rocks, so there wasn't anything much worth stopping for until the road makes a sudden break skywards near Jacob Lake.  There's a bit of higher ground here which gets even higher to the north and can't be bypassed to the south because of an inconvenient hole in the ground, viz. the Grand Canyon.  The extra altitude makes for cooler temperatures, but has no effect on the wind.

Somewhere behind those trees is a The Grand Canyon

Cloud shadow on the Vermilion Cliffs

Downhill all the way to Navajo Bridge and across the Mighty Colorado, then steadily uphill again almost all the way to Flagstaff, where it is windy.  Nothing very exciting on this stretch either, except the bridge over the Little Colorado at Cameron.

Two bridges, actually; the pillars of the new one can be seen  under the deck of the old one

Arrived in Flagstaff at nightfall.  It is almost eight pm.  Actually, it isn't, but the ASBO's clock gets its time from Sarah the SatNav's GPS wossname.  Sarah thinks it is an hour later than it actually is, because no-one has told her that Arizona doesn't do Summer Time.  But it does do wind.

Wind.  I hope it is leaving the Tandem Things well alone.