I am fortunate that my biological clock is still on Eastern Daylight Time–I’m able to rouse my tired old bones out of bed at an early hour, and be out of the Silver Saddle Motel by 6:45 am. Many of my fellow rally participants are still at the motel as I leave, although one team is also preparing to leave.
With the first stop of the day being Albuquerque, I hop on I-25 south to dispose of some miles. Our first checkpoint of the day is the second of three muffler men. This one is located atop the May Café in Albuquerque, a Vietnamese restaurant. This muffler man has only recently been restored–he lost his arms in a wind storm many years ago, and only recently was enough money collected to restore his missing appendages.
Unfortunately with nothing open this early, the gate to the parking lot was closed, so I only got a photo of the back side.
From Albuquerque, I hop back onto I-25 to San Antonio…New Mexico. The target there is The Original Owl Bar & Café. Easy find.
Part of today’s theme has to do with missiles, and things that go boom. Something went “boom” in a big way, not to far from here. Our next checkpoint is the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. So we wouldn’t glow in the dark after our visit, or perhaps due to the actual Trinity Site being open only two days of the year, we only had to find the historical marker for the Trinity Site.
From here, the next checkpoint was in Magdalena, to locate the Route 60 Trading Post. Not too terribly difficult to find!
After leaving the small town of Magdalena, it’s time to set our sites on something larger. Much larger. How about Very Large?
The Very Large Array in Socorro is an array of 27 radio telescopes arranged in a “Y” configuration, and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The three arms of the “Y” are tracks, so the dishes can be spread out further to focus on different items in space. Over the course of 16 months, the arms of the “Y” lengthen from about 2/3 of a mile to almost 23 miles. The dishes are 82 feet across.
Unfortunately the VLA visitor center was temporarily closed. Below, you can see one of the 27 dishes peeking out behind the left side of the sign, and off the right side on the horizon, you can barely see three (maybe more) trailing off into the distance.
Is it Pi Day yet? How about pie from Pie Town, New Mexico? This is apparently the place in town to get pie–the Pie Town ‘Ohana’ Café being our checkpoint.
The next checkpoint was a bit of a dilemma. We had to locate Becker’s Transcontinental Garage in Springerville, Arizona. The building we had to was originally a Ford dealership from nearly a century ago. The historical plaque outside the building has gone missing, but these were indeed the historic buildings.
One thing I should mention is how windy this day was. This was a constant, hard wind that was probably a constant 30-40 MPH, with higher gusts that often shook the car like a toy. Tumbleweeds weren’t tumbling–they were instead shot like projectiles across the highways. It felt like a bizarre, desert-based version of the old video game Galaga, with the tumbleweeds exploding as I drove over them or hit them with the front of the car. The header image for this page doesn’t show it all that well, but there was constant dust blowing across our path, especially when we were heading due west.
And westward we went, up US-191 and US-180 to I-40, to our next checkpoint.