Home

Is good...

What should have been a simple, fly out, meet, fly back kind of trip turned into- oh so much more.

Durango, Co is a great place. I love the Southwest and even though it was cold, it was quite beautiful. The high desert air is great, and everything was going fine.

Come yesterday morning, we wake up to snow (expected). We head to the airport to see if we can get earlier flights (since everything was going so well, we got to leave early) only to find lines- long lines. The Durango airport is not big, so lines were a surprise. This is when things started getting bad. The first two flights of the day to Denver had already been cancelled, and though the forecast was predicted to get worse, United didn't cancel the remaining three flights (Thanks United!), so we waited. After they cancelled the 1:20 flight it was clear that alternative plans were needed. We then found out that all the flights on Friday (today) were already sold- not good.

Our choices, hang in Durango on indefinate standby, til who knows when (edit: Isn't that what indefinate means?); or get a car and drive somewhere else . ABQ is the closest airport, but we were initially told that there were no available flights until Sat AM. That was going to work for me because I have a race Saturday (tomorrow) morning. Where else can we go? Phoenix? Vegas? (Vegas!). Time for help, and who better to help than the wonderful E. First off, E says it's 9 hours to drive to Phoenix and almost 10 to drive to Vegas (Vegas!). That's far... too far. Now I guess I could have figured this out if the Durango airport free wifi worked, but it didn't. But since E is better than free, I was better off anyway. E finds flights out of ABQ the same night. "Book 'em" says I (probably a little more pleading than that). So I read her info and she fills out the 73 pages worth of info required to buy a plane ticket, and presto! No flights left. Try again, repeat, give up.

Ok, no flights out of Durango, no flights out of ABQ, what to do? I try to call Delta, and spend a few moments yelling at the f^&%$ing automated voice system (hint for Delta, when I say "representative" it means I'm tired of talking to your stupid computer and would like to talk to a stupid human- maybe even two or three stupid humans before I finally would get to talk to someone useful) when I see E on call waiting. I click over, and she has good news. Flights out of ABQ the next morning. Booked, done. Now I need to get to ABQ, and the fun just begins...

Three of us rent a piece-of-crap American rental car and hit the road.

SW Colorado/NW New Mexico is both beautiful and mortifying. Allow me to illustrate:

A Church:


A Better (?) Church:



A Beauty Salon:



And a Sypmosium (you have to trust me that it really did say UFO on the left)



A view from the road:



A Different View From The Same Road:


The picture can't really illustrate how cool this was, but look at it big and marvel:



The Sandia Mountains, and the end of our Journey:



But of course it's not complete without the crappy phone pic of the casino tent in the middle of nowhere:



ABQ was great. We had a great dinner, I met Uncle & Aunt E, and I went to bed, woke up and came home.

The End