Long Travel Day

The first day of this trip would prove to be a long one.  We got up early, 3 AM for a 6:45 flight out of LaGuardia.  We had to both shower before we left the house at 4.  We gave ourselves a little more time because we also had to return a rental car which we had picked up in Nanuet the previous day.  We find it cheaper to rent a car for a one way rental than to get a car to drive us to the airport or to park at the airport.  It was a good thing we left so early because we had problems with returning the car.  We arrived at the rental car place probably a little after 5.  They were unable to return the car due to some computer glitch.  Apparently when I picked the car up in Nanuet, despite the fact that we were given a rental contract and other paperwork, our rental was never entered into the computer system, so as far as they knew or their computer knew, we didn’t even have a car.  The paperwork in our hands, which was computer generated, said otherwise.  The guy behind the counter went searching for his manager.  After about 5 minutes of waiting he told Chris that he was waiting for his manager to call because he didn’t know what to do.  So there we were thinking that the manager was home and we were waiting for him to wake up and call back!  Luckily that was not the case and after a few more minutes the manager came out to help us.  The manager explained to us what happened and said that the only real option, since LaGuardia had not rented us the car, was to wait until the Nanuet office opened up at 7 AM, at which point they would call Nanuet, Nanuet would enter us into the system, so LaGuardia could process our return.  The manager apparently did not see the absurdness in this request as it was now 5:30 and our flight was leaving at 6:45.  We still had to get on the shuttle bus to the main terminal (shuttle busses don’t exactly run every minute at 5:30 AM), check in, wait in line at security and get to our gate.  Waiting until 7 AM was not an option.  When the manager said there was nothing else he could do, Chris told him to just hand write a receipt with all of the information on it and he could settle it later when Nanuet opened.  The manager thought this was a good idea, so that is what he did.  We should have known renting from Avis was a bad idea.  We always rent from National but this time we took Avis because the nearest National facility was at an airport and Avis was local.  The car was in rough shape and we had all of these problems so we will not be renting from them again.  We finally were on our way to the terminal at about 5:45.  Luckily there were small lines for checking in and security was not bad either.  We arrived at our gate about 10 minutes before they started boarding.   

Flying today is no longer fun, especially when you cannot afford first class.  We had the privilege of paying $34 extra for Jackie’s “premium” seat, which wasn’t really premium at all; it was a plain old aisle seat in the middle of the plane.  On American, aisle and window seats cost an extra $14 or $34, depending on the length of the flight, and that is per leg!  So if your trip involves a layover you have to pay the money all over again to not be squeezed in between two strangers.  So on top of the $200 we paid for Jackie’s ticket from NY to Albuquerque, we also paid an extra $60 for our two pieces of luggage plus $34 for that awesome aisle seat.  There is one way around paying this premium seat fare if you are willing to roll the dice.  If you select your seat 24 hours or less before you flight the airlines release the unsold premium seats to everyone meaning if you are lucky you can snag a window or an aisle, or even two seats next to each other for free, assuming there are some left.  For the second flight we were able to do this.  We each got an aisle seat but they were 8 rows apart.  We arrived in Dallas a few minutes behind schedule.  We only had a one hour layover and by the time we made our way across the airport to a different terminal, our flight had just about completely boarded.  We got right on the plane, found our seats, stashed our bag in the very last overhead space on the plane and tried to relax.  The plane didn’t leave the gate right away because of some “non-critical” malfunction, as the pilot described.  This allowed about another half dozen people who might have otherwise missed this plane to get on.  When the malfunction was signed off by a technician as something that did not need to be fixed right away, we left.  The second flight was just under an hour and a half, which was not bad at all.

We arrived in Albuquerque around 11 AM.  Since we had to wait for 25 rows of passengers to get off the plane before us, when we got to the luggage area our bags were already circling the carousel.  We grabbed our bags, got on the shuttle to the rental car place, found a car which we deemed suitable to drive across the country in, (we took a Chevy Equinox) and were off.  By this time we were starving.  There was no food on the plane, not even a ½ ounce bag of pretzels, and we had no time for anything in Dallas so we headed to one of our favorite places in Albuquerque, which is a bakery that sells bread made with green chiles.  The place was closed!  Usually they are open on Mondays but today they had a sign outside saying they were closed.  We quickly got out our roadfood app and found a place less than a mile away that had great Mexican food.  Garcia’s kitchen was a few blocks away and they advertised themselves as having breakfast anytime.  Even though it was now after noon we were in the mood for breakfast so this was a good thing.  We ordered an order of chicharrones which are probably not good for you, an order of guacamole and chips which had slices of jalapenos in it, plus we each ordered a breakfast burrito Christmas style.  In New Mexico when people get chiles on their food they get it one of three ways, green chiles, red chiles, or Christmas, which means both.  We like them both so that’s what we got.

After a very satisfying meal we headed south towards Las Cruces.  Las Cruces is about 220 miles from Albuquerque.  We had plans on staying the night there.  On the way we hit up the Hard Rock Café in Albuquerque for our mandatory magnet, then headed south on I-25.  Chris mentioned that New Mexico is easily one of his top 5 states to visit.  We’ve been to all 50, most states we have been to multiple times and New Mexico makes Chris’s list of best ones to visit.  We both agree on Vermont and Montana being our 1 and 2.  It is clear probably better than 300 days a year, there are hardly any people, there is a ton of open space, there is great scenery, there is no humidity, and they have green chiles!  On the way down to Las Cruces we made a slight detour.  About 10 years ago when we were down this way a friend of ours visited the VLA, or Very Large Array one day after work (that’s a whole other story because work was over 4 hours away).  We had seen it in pictures and in at least one movie but we had mostly forgotten about it until about a week ago when Chris was looking at a New Mexico state map for something to do while we were down here.  We decided to head west about 60 miles off course to check this out.  The VLA is a series of 27 different radio antennas that look deep into space.  Think of it like a telescope but you can’t look through it as you could a regular telescope.  These telescopes are looking at radio waves that you cannot physically see.  Each antenna, which look like giant satellite dishes are 82 feet wide and weigh over 200 tons.  The 27 dishes are laid out in a Y shape with each leg of the Y covering about 13 miles.  They way these dishes are laid out and interconnected with each other allow them to together act as one single dish which allows scientists to look far into the universe.  Enough science for now, you can read all about it at Wikipedia.  We wanted to get a close up view of these things and they were quite impressive.  We watched a short video in the unstaffed museum, signed the guest book in the museum (we were the 3^rd visitor of the day and it was already 3 PM) and drove around and looked at these things.  One was actually being repositioned which was kind of cool to see.
After leaving the VLA we headed back east towards I-25 and then south to Las Cruces.  Before getting to the interstate we stopped a few times for geocaches.  At one cache we saw two foxes out in a field that appeared to be playing with each other.  We got one picture but as we tried to move in a get a better shot they went underground to hide from us.

Assembly building.  This is where they repair the antennaes.  Repairs are usually made once every 3-4 years.  This is also where each was assembled back in the 1970's.

Our car

Nice open spaces

Large ant hill near a geocache

Fox in the middle of the picture

By the time we got in we were very tired.  We arrived at our hotel 9 PM local time, which was really 11 PM our time.  That was a long day after getting up at 3.  An important lesson learned from this trip was to not plan on driving an additional several hundred miles after flying all day. We were exhausted and probably fell asleep less than 5 minutes after hitting the bed.

Today's route