Road Trip | How to Get Lost in New Mexico

USA, here we come!

I hadn’t realized, until I started scrolling through old road trip pictures, how far and wide our ’09 Rendezvous actually took us. Not only did it get us down to the New Mexico Whitesands, it also explored parts of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State with us.

It’s pretty likely that our three teenagers were less enthusiastic than their parents were about these treks. Ok. It’s a lot likely. There was just so much bribery and cajoling and compromising. I mean, how are you supposed to keep 5 people happy? All at once? When you’re travelling hundreds and hundreds of kilometers each road trip? I don’t think we ever really figured that out, and I couldn’t find very many pictures of smiling teenage boys in my file. But the SUV sure served us well!

Giant array = giant dismay

‘Not sure what the “Very Large Array” is? Yeah. I wasn’t either. It’s this:

Yup. A big field full of dishes. My hubby had seen them in a movie and was pretty stoked about detouring to “just drive by” on our way North and out of New Mexico.

One thing we know for sure about road tripping as a family is that I should, 100%, never-ever-never navigate. I mean, I can read the map and do a reasonable GPS-voice impersonation, but do not (do not!) listen to me if I decide to follow my “gut.”

Because 3 out of 3 boys were totally not into visiting the Very Big Array, I was determined to souse out the quickest path to and from that field. The map showed two options: main highway, and a secondary route. It looked highway-ish. My gut said, Definitely follow that highway-ish red line on the map – it’s so.much.shorter. than the real highway. My gut was wrong. Really so completely wrong.

Warning signs

To be fair, our frame of references for “rough road ahead,” and “Beware: rocks on road,” road signs are Rocky Mountain signs that simply note that a beautifully winding mountain highway might get a little seasonally dodgy.

Fair warning: if you come across these signs in New Mexico it means the road is made entirely of giant stab-y, tire-piercing stones. That actually pierce your tires. And leave you stranded between apparently abandoned homes along a completely abandoned road in a wholly abandoned desert.

The short cut red line that led to the Very Big Array was not a short cut. Especially not once we’d emptied the entire contents from the vehicle in order to get at and mount the spare tire, and then (after re-packing all of our belongings) limped our way 80 more miles to the array, and then on to the main highway. The array itself? Yeah, it’s probably 15 minutes off the main highway. We added hours and hours to our travel time by taking the short cut.

Canadian hitch-hiker

We paused at the array. It seemed only fitting to pay it some kind of respect given all we’d sacrificed to get to it. And then nursed our poor Buick and its broken foot to the highway, praying to the tire gods that the spare would hold until we could get to any kind of civilization to buy a replacement tire for our shredded original.

The spare did not hold. It wheezed out a protesting gasp a few miles down the highway. And we were stuck. In the States. In New Mexico.

So, I went and stood in the middle of the highway. All 5’2″ of mom Me. I hailed a passing truck (with a beautiful human and her dog and her threats of, “Do you know how lucky you are? No one ever stops for hitch hikers in New Mexico!”) and got dropped off at a suspect looking town up the highway. The broken down shack of a garage that called itself the tire place happened to have two gentleman on the yard. I (don’t judge me) pleaded our case and (I said don’t judge me!) jumped in the truck with one of them and another spare tire, praying a) the spare would fit the Buick, and b) that I’d live to see that happen.

On the road again

I lived! And the spare fit. And it got us all the way to the next nearest city (none of the towns en route had anything close to a tire shop…but they definitely had some interesting places that looked like they were probably “We’re totally a tire shop!” fronts for much scarier businesses…). There? We found that sanctum we all know as WalMart. And we just happened (we could do another blog on “Road Trip Coincidence: Miracle? Or plain dumb luck?”) to roll up with enough time in the day for them to swap our small town spare for a less-small-town proper tire. Very big array? Very big adventure, I’d say! And I’m sure my kids would totally agree. Offered enough bribes.

Giving up the Rendezvous was no small thing for us. Canon Beach, Oregon, Seattle, Vancouver, Everywhere Alberta. Coeur d’alene, Idaho. Oh. Yeah. Coeur d’alene. Don’t get me started on that short cut.

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