Days 9, 10 - Thurday and Friday - Santa Fe and Mesa Verde, CO

A day that starts with an hour-long massage at Ten Thousand Waves, ends with a Rocky Mountain trout “…dusted with blue corn meal, pan-fried and served with a jocana slaw, fried squash blossoms and grilled horseradish sour cream…” AND has a Dairy Queen cone in between is a VERY good day. That was the case yesterday, Thursday.

Ten Thousand Waves is one of my two “must” stops during any visit to Santa Fe. The massage therapists are fantastic and worth the exposure to the (somewhat) New Age atmosphere. The spa itself is a series of multi-level earth-tone wooden rooms and platforms blending into and concealed by the indigenous landscape in the hills fifteen minutes northeast of Santa Fe. It’s billed as “Japanese-style” because of its communal (bathing-suit optional) hot tubs, architecture, and landscaping. (It certainly isn’t by the ethnicity of staff: there’s nary an Asian face in sight.) Some of the offerings are a bit exotic: aside from the nightingale-dropping facial (mentioned in a previous post), there are four-handed massages; massages with hot stones; in-water massages, to name the ones I remember.

Mine was just a simple deep-tissue massage with warm oils and focusing on the neck and shoulder areas, which are tight in the best of times, but now particularly so from all the accumulated miles of driving. “How was it?”, you ask. Well, it was the shortest hour of the trip. And the most heavenly. Jeanette (the therapist’s name) found the trouble-spots on both shoulders AND the release point for a recurring neck “crick”. I could have stayed on that table the entire day, but finished instead with a soak in the hot-tub, which, at that hour – 10:30 am – was empty. I skipped the cold-plunge this time. (On a previous visit, I rolled in the snow before climbing into one of the private tubs – there are several available. It was….different.)

My destination for Thursday’s drive was Mesa Verde National Park in the southwest corner of Colorado, with its spectacular and well-preserved ruins of Ancestral Puebloans (the new term vs. “Anasazi”) dwellings.



The road, mostly Route 550 North, goes through Cuba (!) and the town of Aztec (more about the “Aztec Ruins” later), and changes from flat to climbing and winding as it enters Colorado. And what has been a harsh, dry, inhospitable landscape of ground-hugging brown vegetation transforms, within a matter of miles, into hillsides of pine trees and irrigated fields. It took a little time to adjust to seeing so much green, particularly the green of grazing grass, after so much desolate scrub. Seeing snow-capped mountains (the Rockies?) in the distance, after the two days of crossing the flatlands of Texas and New Mexico, was also a reminder that I was making progress.

My main companion each day is NPR, when more powerful stations broadcasting country music, Christian rock (what a strange concept), or fundamentalist preachers do not drown it out. In the Southwest, many of the NPR stations have programs addressing the needs and interests of the Native American population. (If you look at a map of Arizona and New Mexico, there is a large patch-work of lands belonging to tribes whose names are familiar from movie Westerns: Apache, Hopi, Ute, Navajo, Zuni, Mescalero, etc. ) Thursday, for example, I listened to a call-in show with a dermatologist debunking the myth that dark(er) skin peoples are naturally protected from sunburns. The most interesting call was from a hunter in Alaska (!) asking about the sun-exposure from “…being out on the ice for hours at a time…”. You don’t get that on commercial radio!

(This is my first extended exposure to the state/status of Native Americans and it’s depressing and shaming. The top story on the Santa Fe NPR news was about Hopi tribe voting against having casinos, thus becoming the only tribe out of 23 in New Mexico to decline the opportunity. Considering the visible poverty in the Reservations I passed through, it’s admirable because, whilecasinos have not proven to be panaceas, they do inject cash and provide (some) employment. And yet, they are passing up on a projected $24 million/yr in revenue, according to the story. It also must be bitterly ironic to have one’s cultural artifacts be collectibles on eBay and worth thousands of dollars on “The Antiques Roadshow”, yet have both the highest unemployment AND lowest post-secondary education rates in the country. The history of injustices is lengthy and old news, as we all know, but the consequences are in the present and eye-opening when seen -- even briefly -- first-hand. It made me think about things that need doing.)

Thursday was also the day when I crossed the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 7380 ft., near Aztec, NM.. My dim recollection from 7th grade history/geography is that it has to do with….with…..I can’t remember. (If anyone knows and wants to add a comment to explain, please do!). Which brings me to the subject of Aztec Ruins National Monument, outside the town of Aztec.

Do NOT be fooled: there are NO Aztec (the culture) ruins at Aztec Ruins National Monument. What you find out there is that settlers in the 19th century THOUGHT the ruins (which are Native Puebloan) were Aztec because they couldn’t believe the “Indians” could build such structures. But the name stuck for the town and for the ruins, in what I think is a deliberate misnomer to attract tourist dollars, i.e. they are ruins and they are in Aztec (the town). The ruins themselves are interesting, but certainly not as much as they would be if they WERE from the Aztec civilization.

Despite my comments in the previous posting about The Far View Lodge at Mesa Verde National Park, I do recommend it because of its location inside the park. The nearest other lodging is 30+ minutes away, more if you are stuck being an RV on the spectacular-but-narrow-and-winding road between the Park entrance and the Visitor Center. By staying at The Far View , one can sleep a little later and still be there early enough to get tickets for the ranger-guided tours of the cliff dwellings. The rooms don’t have TVs or telephones, but do have outside balconies with chairs and that “far view”: there is nothing in sight for miles and miles. (A great place to sit, just after sunset, in the cool of the 7000 foot altitude, sip a single malt, and watch bright Venus above a sliver moon against a blue-black desert sky.)

The Metate Restaurant onsite, according to my waitress, was “..rated the 6th best in the entire state by Colorado Magazine”. Without having tried the five ahead of it, I would still rank it sixth. My trout was dry (I had the same dish tonight at the Holiday Inn in Chinle, AZ, and it was half the price and twice as moist), the rice pilaf lumpy, and the “strawberry and blueberry shortcake”, just a few strawberries (and even fewer blueberries) plus a dollop of whipped cream sandwiched between two cookies passing for short-bread. (If there is one thing I know, it’s short-bread: it’s one of the “S”s that make Scotland a frequent destination.) I ate, wrote post-cards, and tried to ignore the screaming child two tables away.

The two cliff-dwelling sites I toured this morning are easily recognizable for images, particularly Cliff Palace’s, that have become iconic. It looks the way ruins should look: structures intact enough to be recognizable for what they were originally, yet with enough jagged edges and incompleteness to show abandonment and create an aura of mystery. Photos make it look bigger than it really is. The sandstone-colored buildings stretch for less than the length of a football field and only a depth of less than a hundred feet – eighty nine feet, if I remember the Ranger’s recitation. All of it is recessed under the protective overhang of the scooped out base of the mesa, and the height of the natural opening, which I would estimate at a couple of hundred feet, gives it a dramatic frame and majesty.

Walking within the site and peering into the buildings is a humbling experience: the daily life of the Ancestral Puebloans was not easy. Forty would have been old age and infant mortality is estimated at 50%. Water was scarce, and in the case of Cliff Palace, the nearest source was miles away – speculation about their departure from the site centers on a 23 year-long drought in the late 1200s A.D. Access from the top of the mesa was via toe and hand-holds carved on the face of the cliff, not the series of ladders and wide steps we used (which still made my palms sweat). I left grateful for being born in our time.

Tomorrow, Saturday, it’s another on the list of “1000 Places To See Before You Die”: Canyon de Chelly National Monument, with the oldest Ancestral Puebloan ruins known, and then a three and half hour drive to Flagstaff followed by dinner in Sedona.

Day 8 - Santa Fe, NM to Mesa Verde National Park (Cortez, CO)

This will be VERY brief -- the real entry will be posted tomorrow -- since I've been given 15 minutes of airline from the basement office of the Far View Lodge where I am staying the night. (The rooms don't have telephones or TVs.) ARAMARK holds the concession for lodgings in this National Park, which was voted the TOP MONUMENT in teh 1999 reader's poll of Conde Nast's "Traveller Magazine, according to the plaque on one of the walls. It's all about location: the lodge looks like a run-down strip-mall Motel 6 at three times the price. More tomorrow!

Day 8 - Albuquerque to Santa Fe, NM -

(Some blog "house-keeping": photos may not be forthcoming until I get a high-speed connection; I'll be posting links - upper right-hand under (duh!) "Links".)

While I've kept a personal journal off-and-on since receiving one for my eleventh birth-day, writing (somewhat) journalistic prose for an audience is a new and difficult experience. My "regular" writing is poetry, produced painstakingly (as some of you know) and not under deadline. Finding the right words in their right sequence to convey the imprecise precisely is as slow and laborious a process for me as it is for those Tibetan monks shown picking and placing individual grains of colored-sand, over a period of weeks, to create a Mandala comprised of complex patterns. (They sweep the completed work away as a symbol of the impermanence of things...amazing.) So please be kind if you see typos, dangling participles, etc.: believe me, they mortify me more than you ever could by calling attention to them.

The work on "Baby" was under $200.00, which left me positively light-headed. The technician also completed it in time for me to get to Santa Fe by noon on a beautiful, sunny, and moderately warm (mid-80s) day. I changed tonight's lodgings from a fellow Globalfreeloaders member (see link) to a condo unit in the Fort Marcy Condominium Resort Hotel within a ten minute (downhill) walk from the Plaza. (For those contemplating visiting Santa Fe, I highly recommend this place: my unit is large, has a fireplace, separate bed-room, and a kitchen. And, it was $49.95!! Use "hotels.com" to get a good rate, then call Fort Marcy's reservations desk. They'll match the "hotels.com" price, but save you from paying the "hotels.com" booking fee.)

I spent the afternoon wandering around familiar places -- I've been to Santa Fe several times before -- including a gallery exhibiting photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, and finished the evening with dinner at the Coyote Cafe, which is a favorite from past trips.

Tomorrow morning, the reason for stopping here: a massage at Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese-style spa in the hills outside of town (see link). It's worth trip. (They have a facial that uses nightingale dung....It's sterilized, of course, but still! I thought about it earlier when I saw a local character walking around with a parrot on his left shoulder...and white splotches of parrot poop on the back of his black shirt...)

Lastly, from Katherine Hepburn's biography (one of my audio books), her take on life: "...work hard, love someone, and have some fun. And if you are lucky, be loved back and have good health." Can't argue with that. She and the Dalai Lama would have made a great couple.

Days 6, 7 – Carlsbad (Caverns), Roswell (UFOs!), Artesia (home-made “gorditas” and tamales), and Albuquerque (car repair), NM.

Yesterday (Monday) was a better than a good day. Any day when I can “DQ” (Dairy Queen) not just once, but twice (!) gets a gold star. There is better ice-cream and gourmet flavors aplenty elsewhere, but nothing beats a simple cone of soft vanilla, with the signature swirl on top, to take me back forty years to when my first house in America was two blocks from the local franchise. A cone was a dime then….

The first one yesterday was at a DQ just off I-20 at the exit for Baird,Tx after two hours of visual monotony: mile after mile of a pencil-straight road bordered by table-top-flat farm land. Aside from the slight side-motion of the car, buffetted by an unrelenting cross-wind, the only other distraction was the steady impact of insects on the wind-shield. (After a while, I amused myself by trying to predict the next spot and what the “connect-the-splats” would produce in outline. It looked something close to Lincoln’s profile at one point.)

The DQs here have a full fast-food menu and this one was no exception. The chicken fingers were tender, freshly made, the portion-size generous, and my order brought to the table. It also came with a slice of toast (??) in addition to the fries. And, along the lines of “you know you’re in Texas when…”, my small drink was a 24 oz. (!!) cup. (You also know you’re in Texas when the predominant road-kill is armadillos and turtles.)

I arrived in Carlsbad in the late afternoon, my destination an Econolodge on the south side of town. It had been my intention to spend two nights, exploring Carlsbad Caverns National Park today (Tue.), including the tours requiring head-lamps and knee pads. However, replacing the burned out headlight bulb was a priority and the nearest Porsche dealership along my route was in Albuquerque, with their service department requiring the car for a few hours. (I decided to also get an early oil change as long as it was at a dealer.) Thankfully, re-shuffling things on the way from Carlsbad to Roswell and Albuquerque, was fairly easy to do and still allowed for a morning at the Caverns.

The Caverns. By getting there as the park opened at 8:30 am, I was among the first dozen to take the self-guided “Natural Entrance” tour, which is a 750 ft descent over a mile and a half into the bowels of the main cave. (And, by being the youngest – by far – or, at least, the fastest walker among that first group, I was alone for most of the time, which enhanced the experience. The lighting is subdued, so one can pretend to be an early explorer, though they didn’t have the benefit of broad and smooth paths with hand-rails. As for the sights, I would say that, if you’ve seen one staglamite, you’ve seen them all…if I were only a cynic. Yes, they start looking the same after a while, and, no, I couldn’t always match the formations with the imaginative names (“Chinese Temple”, “Bottomless Pit” – which the small-print acknowledged was actually 140 ft. deep…), but the scale of the place is astonishing and deserving of superlatives…which would also apply to the gift-shop and the other concessions designed to separate the visitor and his money.

The “Natural Entrance” tour segues into the “Big Room” tour, which is another mile-long loop, this time around the main chamber at the bottom of the visitor-accessible area. I took it as well, but for this portion, there were more people along the way, though I was still the youngest in most cases and, still, the fastest. (It reinforced the decision to make this trip now vs. later. First, “Golden Years” aren’t guaranteed. Secondly, given how much huffing and puffing I heard, I am glad to be travelling while still vigorous and (relatively) youthful.)

My next stop, in Artesia, NM, a small town 45 minutes north of Carlsbad – the caverns are 30 minutes south of Carlsbad proper – was the highlight of the day. Elizabeth, my young ex-colleague and friend, grew up in Artesia, to which her parents had immigrated from Mexico some thirty years ago, and where he still farms land leased from the same owner. (I “found” Elizabeth and her husband Paul, hired both into the firm, and trained, managed, and mentored her during her tenure at TP.) I had to pass through Artesia to Roswell, so she invited me meet her parents, since they had heard about me already over the years and that I spoke Spanish. (The original invitation had to been to have breakfast with them on Wednesday, but this changed to lunch, Tuesday, because of my car problems.) And that’s how I came to have fresh, home-made tamales and “gorditas” (deep-fried corn-dough pockets filled with beans and/or carne -- yum!) for lunch today and meet both her parents, Pilar and Enrique, and her brother Henry, in the photo below:

Elizabeth's parents and her brother


Most of the conversation was in Spanish, since it was a more comfortable language for the parents, but I did manage to convey how much I enjoyed working with Elizabeth and how proud they could feel about her combination of strong values, intelligence and industry. I told them how, seeing the children, we also see the parents and it was clear how Elizabeth reflected them.

Roswell was next or, rather, the “UFO Museum and International Research Center” in Roswell. It was in the outskirts of Roswell that the crash of a purported UFO, complete with little gray/green men, occurred in 1947 and was subsequently allegedly covered up by the government. The museum is in the space of a former movie theater and consists of a large, open space with displays, mostly text and photos, along the walls. The production value of the displays is on a par with that seen in middle-school science fairs – large matte-boards with lots of writing, big-headlines, diagrams and pasted-on illustrations or photos. By the very nature of the subject, there are no artifacts of proven extra-terrestrial manufacture or provenance. The best exhibit is a prop from a movie about the cover-up: a dummy alien on an operating table, complete with a gowned and masked mannequim doctor ready to dissect… The shop is worth a visit because of all the gee-gaws and T-shirts (some very imaginative) with the alien/UFO theme. See for yourself:

A store across from the UFO Museum. (Click on the photo to read some of the small print on the windows.)


I parked here for the museum. A little green man wearing a "E-Z Parking" T-shirt took my money...


The focal point of the alien experience in Roswell. (I love the "Research Center" subtitle.)


I wonder how Einstein would have felt about having his portrait in the museum.


Draw your own conclusions: REAL alien or something from a bad art class?


"Alien" in suspended animation...


A close-up. How seriously can one take a "museum" that uses movie props?


The "best" exhibit in the whole place. A prop donated by the makers of a schlock film about the Roswell Incident.


The "doctor" seems poised to fight or flee, but not to perform an autopsy...


So, what did I learn today? From the Caverns, that Time is insignificant to a ceiling drip that will take tens of thousands of years to form a staglamite, and how to use that in meditation. From lunch at the Hernandez’, a reminder about how hard first-generation immigrants work for the second-generation and how much our society would lose without both. From the Dalai Lama (on CD) that it’s not the fame of the teacher, the elegance of the writing, the themes of the lessons, or the truths in the teaching that matter, but our emotional connection/response to what is heard. (So why do gurus have followers??) And from the drive itself, that the way to average over 90 mph for fifty miles is to have a straight road, sparse traffic, and a bigger idiot averaging 95 mph ahead of you.

Tomorrow, it’s Santa Fe in the afternoon, after the car is done. At least it shouldn’t be a another case of “Oh, about a thousand dollars”….(see first entry).

Days 5,6 - Sunday and Monday - Natchez to Grapevine, Texas


It’s always great to see familiar and friendly faces after time among strangers and last night (Sunday) was no exception. After three nights in “…one-night cheap motels” (Eliot in “Prufrock”), I am at the home of Paul and Elizabeth in Grapevine, Texas, just west of Dallas. Their hospitality is heart-warming, particularly the little touches, like the tray in my room with bottles of water and assorted snacks.

Sunday's drive, 410 miles from Natchez, Miss., will stick in memory for the variety of carnage seen on the road and the small act of not contributing to it. In the span of some thirty miles on Route 15 north on the way to Interstate 20, I passed by (not over) the remains of armadillos (1), raccoons (3), opossums (3), fawn (1), cat (1- black), skunk (1), and one unidentifiable fresh mess (to which I had been alerted by seeing the red pick-up truck two hundred yards ahead of me swerve into the on-coming traffic lane -- and back-- for no apparent reason: as I got closer, the two carrion-birds unhappily taking flight from the red bits on the road were a dead giveaway (no pun intended).

Thus far, I’ve also avoided the other main road hazards: speed-traps. In the 1784 miles thus far since Philadelphia, I’ve counted 14, with Maryland having the most (5) and Tennessee none (perhaps because the stretch passed through was short). While I’ve kept my speed at no more than 10-15 miles above the speed limit (which has varied from 55 to 70 mph) and with the other traffic, there was a (brief) point when I would have deserved one. On a section of I-20 towards Dallas where the road was level and straight into the horizon and other cars just dots behind and ahead, I set a new personal speed record: 104 mph. In the Boxster, it felt like 50 mph used to feel in my first car, a 1963 Rambler American.…. I won’t do it again until the next opportunity. (Reading web-logs of others’ cross-country drives, I noted one person’s account of going 130 mph on another part of Texas. I don’t intend to match that!)

Today’s drive is to Carlsbad, NM, some 500 miles and 8 hours away, mostly on I-20, though one part will be on secondary, more interesting roads. The weather looks overcast, which is an improvement over the last few days, but there are warnings of thunderstorms on my path. I’m glad for the new wind-shield wipers and re-sealant on the cloth-top: I’m impressed by how it has withstood the downpours.

I mentioned, in the first entry of this blog, how road-trips are always two trips. the external one and the internal, and even set out the objectives of the former. I had thought, starting out, that I knew the objectives for the latter: to explore the directions and options for the next phase of my life. Few of us, in our busy lives of unrelenting demands from obligations and responsibilities, have the time for a “time-out” for reflection. And when we do, it’s often too short, a matter of hours or, if really planned, a day or a weekend. I know that what I bought for myself in these five weeks on the road is a necessity disguised as luxury.

Setting out, the fork ahead seemed simple enough. At fifty-two (yikes!), I could continue to pursue work paths dictated by chance happenings in the past (including career choice), with their attendant (higher) financial returns and security, or to choose (and follow) avocations that carry little hope of either yet. The question I set out to answer was: “How do I want to live/work going forward that will give me peace, meaning, and a smile at the end?” While the question may be universal, it is a luxury to be able to ask it when hundreds of millions can not. And that truth has been de-railing all the subsidiary questions and eaten up the miles thus far.

Days 3,4 Friday, Saturday - Natchez, Mississipi

(Still working on posting photos -- I've got them, really!)

When talking about the trip with friends, I mused about how, mostly meeting people I would never see again, I could invent new selves – personal background, job, interests, etc. – each time, much like Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser’s characters had done in an episode of “Mad About You” that I had seen years ago. I even said to someone that I could successively “try out” the stereotypically Asian professions: doctor, architect, computer geek…

I should have known that it wouldn’t be necessary to do it myself, that someone would do it for me in a perversion of a line spoken by Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” that goes something like: “Some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them”. It happened during my tour of “Rosalie”, one of the largest antebellum mansions in Natchez.

We were a group of eleven – nine women and two men – being led through the house by a former bank-clerk, now a house-guide with “3000 women bosses”, as he called working for the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution), who had been given the property in 1938 by the two spinsters sisters from the family that had owned it for seventy years. He was sixty-two (deduced by a side-comment about being a ten year-old in 1962), about my size, and a bit like many characters played by Jimmy Cagney: a feisty bantam-weight with a staccato delivery of information interspersed with corny jokes. (Example: as we were standing on the large second-floor balcony over-looking the lush grounds and a vista of both banks of the Mississsipi, he asked: “What’s the difference a ‘porch’ and a ‘veranda’?” When no one answered, he continued: “If you are drinking coffee, it’s a ‘porch’; if you are having a mint julep, it’s a ‘veranda’. We gave a polite chuckle. Then he said: “And what do you call it if you are having neither?” Two second pause, and he answered himself: “A shame.”)

There was also something slightly belligerent about his manner (maybe from having those “3000 women bosses”?) He had asked questions when we had gathered as his tour group – where we were from, where we were going -- but his tone had been inquisitional, not conversational, and lacking in warmth: the questions felt perfunctory and not stemming from genuine curiosity. We were huddled together in the small open area of the dining-room when he asked me what I did, which is never a short answer since “HR Consultant” usually requires an explanation. But, it’s what I told him, though the more accurate answer would have been “Unemployed”. However, that wouldn’t have been “Southern”, i.e., polite, to say. He walked away without comment or a follow-up, but thirty-seconds later, as we were leaving the room, he turned to me and said, with something like the disappointment of a parent at how their child has turned out: “I had you figured for a doctor, a surgeon.” Ah well. I did that to my parents too.

It was also the second time today when my ethnicity led to a false assumption. Ironically, it was also at this mansion, though it was the counter-lady at the ubiquitous gift-shop. I had walked in just behind two clearly Japanese men. They were impecabbly dressed -- fine-knit polo shirts, perfectly combed hair, Summer-weight wool trousers, very nice loafers – AND I had overheard them speaking in Japanese. (I, on the other hand, was wearing cargo shorts, had keys, cell-phone, and a baseball cap dangling from my belt, sockless sneakers, and bad hat-hair.) Ascertaining that I was forty minutes early for the next tour, I left for a walk of the grounds and then for a drive to the post-office to mail postcards.

When I returned, thirty minutes later, the counter-lady – who bore an uncanny resemblance, in voice and shape, to the anthropomorphic (chicken) widow in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons – greeted me with: “Oh, if you hurry you can catch up with your buddies!"” Ah well… Again. (Note: if you want to test YOUR ability to tell Asians apart – at least Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese – from each other, there is a very funny website with 18 photos for which that’s the task. It’s: www.alllooksame.com . I scored seven (7) right.

(Another note: the above experiences were entertaining and not offensive. I didn’t make the people uncomfortable about their mistakes/assumptions, though I could have, nor did I use them as the “teachable moments” that they were. I’m either getting lazier or nicer.)

The rest of the afternoon was great. The casino – on a river-boat moored in town – (indirectly) bought me dinner (catfish almondine, hush-puppies, and a strawberry julep at the “Cock of the Walk”, the seafood place where I also had dinner last night) and a movie. It would also have (almost) paid for the tickets ($21) to the three houses I toured today, but I played roulette and lost $20 of my $50 winnings at black-jack. (Actually, dinner and the movie was $30.25, so I did spend a quarter.)

All in all, Natchez is worth a detour to visit, particularly if the stay is at one of the many fancy B+Bs (vs. my $34.95/night handicap-rate (?!) room at the Econolodge at the edge of town) and during one of the two house-tour festivals called “The Pilgrimage”. I’m told it has great pageantry, complete with a Queen and a King (who wears a Civil Was officer’s uniform!). The city is banking on tourism to replace the lost industrial jobs – tourism employs about 2,500 from a population of around 20,000. The downtown area is a mix of finely restored and dilapidated houses and walkable in two hours, and you can buy a fine, restored Victorian with 6 bedrooms for $325,000 – I saw one for sale at that price.

I’ll be heading to Dallas in seven hours (Sunday morning), with more thunderstorms on the way. Oh, and the low-beam bulb on the front left-headlight burned out, so it’s either high-beams or not driving at night until I can gtet a replacement. (I’m opting for daylight travel, as I may not have a chance to explain before being shot, especially in Texas, by the irate driver in front of me.)