We woke this morning to a hot room, the thermostat apparently not working properly. Outside, the temperature hovered at 0C, with a light coat of snow still on the bicycle seats. We packed and headed toward Taos for breakfast, 150km away, via NM 64. There was no traffic, as we climbed to the ridge at 3200 meters (10,500 feet). The temperature dropped to -4C and we encountered icy drifts across the highway in several places. This is very beautiful country, heavily forested with alpine meadows and streams running fast with snow melt from the previous day’s storm.

Back down on the plateau, with the usual New Mexico scenery of sagebrush and distant mountains, we crossed the Rio Grande Gorge and into Taos, which is far from the sleepy little arts and crafts village we remembered, The Purple Sage Cafe, a newer enterprise, was on the south side of town, in a commercial strip far from the old town square. While dining, we noticed a tourist flyer that advertised the Earthship enclave we passed just before the gorge had an open visitor center. So, we headed back through town, now crowded with tourists and locals out for the Mothers Day holiday and the final day of the spring Arts and Crafts fair in Kit Carson Park. Too many people for us.

The Earthship tour was very interesting. We had toured one of these off-grid structures near Florence, Montana, when we lived in the Bitterroot Valley, so we knew what to expect, but seeing one of the original homes and the evolution of the design was inspirational. Earthships are houses made largely of recycled materials and rammed earth, usually bermed, with a solar greenhouse on the south side and a large rainwater collection cistern to the north, relying on the mass of the house to maintain a comfortable temperature. Rainwater and snow melt is filtered and recycled several times, and electricity supplied with wind turbines and photovoltaic panels

After the tour, we stopped at the Rio Grande Gorge to watch rafters negotiate the rapids 200 meters below, then took backroads around Taos to avoid the slow traffic through town, and headed toward our destination for the next few days in Santa Fe.

Out of Green River, into the sunrise, to Moab, where we grabbed coffee at Moab Classic Bikes and breakfast at the Jailhouse Cafe before getting in a moderately long line for Arches National Park. Moab seems to be busy year around, and especially on holiday weekends: many of the viewpoints were filled to capacity, so most of our photos were drive-by window shots with Judy’s iPad. But, well worth the excursion, and the weather was great. We’ll come back on a future trip.

Back through Moab, we stopped again at Moab Classic Bikes to give out a howdy to Eric, our December Warm Showers guest who is working as a bike mechanic while he prepares for the 2015 Great Divide Mountain Bike Race, a 4000km unsupported mountain bike race from Calgary, AB to Antelope Wells, NM along trails and mountain roads down the continental divide. Then we headed south into the storm of the day.

Headed east from Monticello, Utah, we encountered snow squalls all the way through Colorado, coming into clear skies just before our destination for the night, Chama, NM. The motel we booked via the Internet turned out to be adequate, and the local eatery and watering hole was filled with the distinctive smells of New Mexico cooking, also tasty.

Our eighth day’s travel was entirely within the state of Utah, from Logan to Green River, taking the “back roads” — US 89 to Ogden, I-84 and I-80 to US 40, US 191 to Green River, with mostly light traffic in beautiful country.  The rain stopped for us, hovering over the Wasatch Range as we headed south and then through the I-84 gap into mostly clear skies after the obligatory stop at Starbucks before heading into Starbuck-less territory. We also topped off the tank at Costco: the rest of the day would be nearly 100km between fuel stations.

We stopped briefly for a snack from our on-board larder before turning south on US191 at Duchesne, and stopped at the Greek Streak restaurant in Price for lentil soup and pitas before filling up once again for the 80km no-services run into Green River. The promised thunderstorm of the day broke ahead, though the lightning was already passing to the east, with alternate showers, gusty side winds, and dust storms, fortunately not all at once, or it would have been a mud storm.

With the prospect of two months on the road, and high vacation season ahead, we had decided to book on the cheap side for lodging the next two nights, a mistake, at least for Green River. Green River has fallen on hard times more than once over the decades without recovery between, and now is no exception: our destination turned out to be a large derelict motel recently acquired by an investor hoping to rehabilitate it. With only 40 rooms refurbished, and those in the last month, fresh paint and a heavy dose of perfume spray could not disguise the mold of neglect. The refrigerator didn’t work, the only light in the bathroom was the heat lamp, and the WiFi was elusive and intermittent, when it worked at all (and then only at the office).

After running the fan for an hour, the room was still uninhabitable when we returned from a largely unsuccessful attempt to connect with civilization at the office, so we packed up and moved up the street to double the price for the honeymoon suite at a reputable chain, cheaper rooms having been already booked. Storm or not, we would have pitched our tent in the nearby state park before we could have spent the night itching and wheezing in the first motel, most of which should have been bulldozed. Once settled in the new lodging, a shower and wardrobe change took care of the mold exposure, and the WiFi works, as well as expected in stormy weather in the desert.

Rain, wind, and hail…  It rained all night, with snow higher up.  We visited with other tourists over breakfast, then headed south, with the idea of touring Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve near Arco, Idaho.  Intermittent rain and drizzle characterized this day of travel.  Not the shortest route, but parts I hadn’t been on (Judy had been to the Craters before).

We lunched in Arco, stopping by a city park featuring the sail from USS Hawkbill (SSN-666), a Sturgeon class attack submarine similar to many I had worked on back in the 1970s. Submarines have a relatively short useful life: after a certain number of deep dives, they are retired, the de-fueled reactors stored at the Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington, and the hulls cut up for scrap. A few of the distinctive sail structures wind up in parks like this one. Arco is significant because the U.S. Navy nuclear power program started here, at the nearby Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.

Then on to the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, encompassing a small part of one of the extensive lava fields that cover much of central Idaho, the result of a “hot spot” of magma over which the North American tectonic plate has moved westward over the past 14 million years, with periodic outflows similar to the ones experienced on the Big Island of Hawaii over the past several decades. The CotM area has flows of different ages, and a variety of lava types. Lava is brittle, so visitors are restricted to specific roads and trails within the Monument. It was cold, windy, and rainy, so we didn’t explore too far from the car, though a sun break permitted a 1.2km loop hike in a relatively flat area, though we did tackle a few short, steep trails to peer into the two large spatter cones that are open to the public.

Moving on, we continued south on U.S. 93 to Twin Falls, crossing the Snake River Canyon into town to get our first coffee of the day (at 1600!) and top off the tank at Costco, having learned our lesson on fuel management the day before, and headed off east on I-84, with few fuel stops, in increasingly heavier rain squalls and high crosswinds. As we turned onto I-15 at Tremonton, UT, we were battered by hail, which piled up 8cm deep on the hood where the windshield wipers scooped it. Circling to the north around the mountains to Logan, we again drove into the storm, thankfully nearly hail-free. Arriving at our lodging for the night, we took advantage of the shelter of the check-in portico to inspect the bicycle, clamped on top of the car: no damage was visible, and the seats seemed to be still intact after extended peening with the hail, which, fortunately, was fairly slushy, shattering on impact. Some worry about water forced into bearings, and the seats thoroughly soaked, but we’ll have to deal with that when we’re ready to ride. The weather service predicts more thunderstorms  for Friday along our route, so we’ll no doubt get wetter before we get dried out.

Day 5 was a work day: Judy cleaned up the cabin, full of dead bugs from a year and a half of being closed up, and I cleaned up the wreckage of the greenhouse frame, salvaging usable pieces and bagging the rest. After, we loaded up Ben’s pickup and made a dump run, to the collection site conveniently located 6km west, just across the highway. Then we packed for the second leg of our trip.

Day 6: headed south with what we thought was plenty of time to make our 9:00am meeting, we got a ‘low fuel’ alarm near St. Ignatius. We planned to stop at a station between Arlee and Evaro, conveniently located on our side of the road. Unfortunately, the long hill climb out of Arlee led to fuel starvation, just short of the summit. I can’t remember the last time this happened (I do remember the time, 63 years ago, that I was with my dad when we ran out of gas and he poured a gallon of degreasing solvent from his refrigeration tool kit into the tank and got us home, despite running a bit rough) , but we’ve certainly come close often, making a practice of planning a stop after the warning light comes on.

We didn’t have any flammable solvent handy, but  we could have assembled the bicycle and self-rescued, as the fuel stop was only 3km away, but then we would have a gas can we didn’t plan to use again. We have carried a roadside service plan through AARP for many years, and only used it once, when the battery failed last year while I was in “no lift” status after my surgery. So, we dialed the number (fortunately, one of our phones had service) and waited for the road service truck to arrive from Ronan, 50km behind us, where there had been plenty of fuel stops to choose from…

So, we ended up humbled and 30 minutes late to my appointment in Missoula, to meet with the consultant who took my place at the NIH lab when I didn’t renew my contract last fall.  The project to release a web application I wrote 8 years ago continues to have complications, mostly due to its age–I had updated some parts  over the years to new language upgrades as it migrated from old to new hardware and operating systems, but didn’t revise just for the sake of revision–and the fact I wrote it with a specific user audience and the configuration settings for a specific scientific instrument. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about packaging software in various forms, and are still struggling with some issues with satisfying dependencies. Although the meeting was short, it was productive.

Grabbing a quick espresso on the way out of Missoula, we arrived at The Mill in Hamilton to find that the café there had changed hands and had a new menu and new name: The Cherry Street Cafe. I missed the caprese panini I was hoping for, but the roman crêpe was an excellent substitute. We have found yet another crêperie worth the trip (the other is in Kingston, Washington).

After another stop to drop Judy for a short visit with a friend who will have moved away by the time we return in June, I ended up at the laboratory visitor center, as a visitor this time, a bit later than planned, to find that everyone I knew to contact was away from their desks. Finally, I got someone to fetch me and spent time visiting with my former colleague, continuing the project discussion from the Missoula stop. I also found that the former owner of the Zaxan café at the Mill was running a lunch service at the lab, as well as providing her custom roasted coffee blends to local shops and eateries.

The too-short visit ended, and we continued south, over Lost Trail Pass, stopping for the night in Salmon, Idaho.