Once again it is late, but I promised I'd tell you about our trip here and why it took us so long...
We had planned to stay at Meteor Crater RV Park for two nights, spend a day exploring the crater and then head to our friends house in Albuquerque to spend Christmas. But how quickly plans can change! Tom called us early Monday morning wanting to know if we had looked at the weather forecast? He said there was a weather warning out for a freezing rain and then a snow storm that was supposed to come in that evening and make for treacherous driving and roads on Tuesday when we had planned to travel.
Not wanting to deal with those kind of conditions, we decided to go ahead and leave that morning. We dumped the black and grey tanks and got everything stowed, then stopped at the office to let them know we were leaving a day early. I was VERY surprised when the lady gave us a cash refund for the night we were not going to be there!
About half way to the Arizona border, there was a sign over the freeway saying that Interstate 40 was closed 100 miles ahead. We called Tom to see if there had been anything on the news about why they had closed the freeway. He checked the New Mexico DOT website which said there had been a truck accident at the Continental Divide with a chemical spill. The east bound lanes were closed and west bound had only one lane open. The map on the website showed a short four mile detour around the accident site using the frontage road.
When we got to New Mexico, we stopped at the Welcome Center to get a new map of New Mexico to replace my rather tattered one. The lady there said they were recommending that people leave I-40 at Milepost 20 and take Hwy 503 south and then rejoin I-40 on milepost 53. Well, we looked at the map and saw that it was a detour considerably out of the way and a lot further then the 4 mile detour the DOT map showed.
So we pressed on -- but not for long! At Milepost 26 the eastbound traffic was pulled off the freeway and routed down through NM 11 & 371. The first hour or so was interesting as we were in gorgeous back country that we normally would not have seen. Lots of cliff and red rock and eroded spindles to see as well as many farmsteads with hogans near the main house. But after it began to get dark, it was just long and boring. The road was rough and bounced Auntie Violet around pretty good, even only going 4-5 miles an hour.
We kept in touch with Tom whenever we could get cell phone reception (remember this is NM and cell towers are few and far between at best!) and the Department of Transportation website NEVER did change its four mile detour map! We finally got back onto the freeway about 7:20, but didn't meet any traffic coming from the west for a long while. When we got to the spot where they were being diverted, we saw two lanes of traffic backed up for three miles before they even got onto the detour!
Our 2 1/2 to 3 hour trip to Albuquerque ended up taking us over eight hours! The gorgeous lights of the city were a very welcome sight when we reached Nine Mile Hill and could see it sprawled out below us.
To add insult to injury, the storm is stalled to the north and still hasn't got here!
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