Mile 1,878: cannonball run from Albuquerque to Austin

I slept in. It was wonderful. Allow me to sing the praises of the reasonably clean and halfway decent traveler's motel. It is a boon to the soul and a balm to the spirit of the weary traveler.

As you can tell, I really liked the suite.

I rolled out of bed, f***ked around with my newly-working-again computer for a bit (e.g. watching Flickr Uploadr totally choke and die on the lousy Comfort Inn Wi-Fi) and went for a run before it got too hot. When I came back, I showered and took a dip in the Jacuzzi.

I mean, this place wasn't like the Fairmont or anything... but when you've been on the road for a while it really feels great to pamper yourself. By the time I got back in my car again, I felt even better than I had before I left San Diego.

I loaded up on road food and headed out to the hills. New Mexico roads are fast, and gas is (relatively) cheap, so I ran pretty hard for a while. I had hoped to make Lubbock in a day's drive, but I got a random text message from a friend in San Diego who wanted to know if I was trying to drive straight through to Austin. Almost eight hundred miles! What was he thinking?

I took it as a challenge.

Google Maps would have had me go straight down I-40 to Amarillo and then hang a south down I-35 all the way to Austin. But screw that. I decided to go the weird way, through Roswell and West Texas, so I took U.S. 285, an almost vacant stretch of glass-smooth four lane asphalt. After a couple hours cutting through eastern New Mexico at better than a hundred per, I came upon Roswell: a much bigger city than I had ever imagined. I mean, it's pretty much the only city for many miles around, so it sort of has to be a regional center. It's more than just UFO kitsch.

That, however, was all I was interested in.



There was one big "International UFO Museum And Research Center," which was offputting not least for the fact that it charged admission, and a whole smattering of little kitschy shops. In short, basic roadside attraction culture, but packaged and sold as a commodity. Yahoo.

I got back to my previously scheduled reckless driving, and managed to fall off the route Google had carefully prepared for me:



I found "Continue to follow US-285" to be kind of an ambiguous direction, given the state of southern New Mexico signage. As a result, I went the wrong direction at an incredibly high rate of speed before recognizing my mistake and speeding even faster back in the direction I had come. Fortunately, as it happened, the "rush hour" traffic was apparently in the other direction out U.S. 180, so I only had to pass three cars.

Finally, I crossed the Texas state line! I passed through the town of Pecos, which apparently had suffered a plague or a zombie attack as there were literally no people to be seen. I continued on the impressively well-maintained Texas stretch of 285, which apparently was fringed on all sides by small, slow moving black tumbleweeds.

I slowed experimentally to get a better look at one of them, and it appeared to be crawling. Now, I only had a couple espressos that morning, but I thought it possible that a bunch of hours of high-speed driving was making me see things.

So, I got out:


Big bugger - maybe four inches across. Apparently they just wander around in the summer time. It did seem like they were all going from right to left, but my understanding is that no one knows if it's mating, or migration, or what. Why did the tarantulas cross the road? Because they're a bunch of scary bad-ass arachnids, and they'll cross the road wherever and whenever the hell they please! They were leaving a lot of spider-shaped splotches on the road, however...

The rest of the trip was a straight cannonball down I-10 and up 35 - Texas Troopers were everywhere, though, so I did the whole leg into Austin in the granny lane, moving with traffic, at a steady speed of 80 mph (the legal daytime limit). I pulled in to Round Rock at about 12:30, and woke my dear friends Raymond and Angela up a little while thereafter (Google Maps being a little crappy with the exit sign notation).

Halfway there!

the trip so far