Road Trip !!

For months we had been planning an epic road trip to do for our honeymoon.  Spend a week in Vermont, stay a while in Montreal and Maine, it’ll be awesome!

It had been a massive undertaking to try and get the bike prepped in time, we had just taken it to Ruidoso and noticed it still had some issues that needed to be sorted out. 12 hours from launch with the bike half packed and ready to go and Cece’s knee still hurting from the short trip the week before to Ruidoso we decided to abandon the plan and take the car instead, it wouldn’t be much of a trip if Cece couldn’t walk for all of it with her knee hurting from the vibrations on the bike.  The car would also be warmer in Canada, more comfortable and faster.  We really want to ride to New England but that’ll have to wait.

At 4 in the morning we hit the road. From Rio Rancho to Tramway on the other side of Albuquerque in 15 minutes! thats gotta be some kind of record.

Since I had a blowout 3000 miles after I bought the car new the car has always made a bit of a grinding noise if you accelerated or drove aggressively. I’m not sure if it was the light drizzle and water all the way to the Texas border or the somewhat high speeds for a lengthy time but going through Amarillo I thought the trip was over before it started.  Car was making such a horrible metal on metal grinding noise that we were sure the wheel was going to fall off.

Well we couldnt afford a rental car and we had a motel reservation in 2 days plus several others after that what would be lost of we ended up breaking down or having to wait for the car to be fixed.  We were kind of screwed, do we call the whole trip off or keep going and see what happens.

In the past any time the car started acting up like this, I keep thinking it’s a CV joint somewhere but so far no mechanic has been able to determine the cause, when it starts grinding if I’d let off the accelerator and don’t go past 1/2 throttle and just slow down it mostly goes away and after a few hours of driving it’s back to normal.

Lets go for it!

Not a whole lot to see but fog most of the morning, we kept the cruise control set right at the speed limit to ease the load on the car and by Shamrock Texas the car was back to normal Whew!

We had the car loaded with granola, bananas, crackers and vitamin waters in a cooler, we were planning on not stopping for anything but gas and bathroom breaks the first day as we had 1000 miles to get under our belt as fast as possible.

We did take a slight detour to check out this cool old Conoco station in Shamrock.

Boy Oklahoma sure is boring..

GPS got us temorarily lost in Oklahoma City, some how we wound up at the capitol building.

Wow, I don’t remember there being a giant casino in Tulsa the last time we were here.

Missouri!   First new state of the trip.

Joplin rest area.

We didn’t quite make it to St. Louis the first day like we’d planned.  We came close and stopped only about an hour short because of some major traffic jams from construction and some poor guy’s Cadillac burning to the ground in the middle of I44

We got up good and early the next morning to go check out the St. Louis Arch and continue on to Columus, OH.

Turned out to be a beautiful day after the fog from the previous day burned off

You see some cool things on the road sometimes.

I think we need to go that way to the arch!

At least the arch is easy to find.  We arrived right as they were opening up, perfect!