Well it is about time for the great road trip of 2009 to get underway! We will depart Bulverde around 8AM Friday October 2, 2009 headed about as far West as we can go.

Our first stop is a mere 592 miles to Las Cruces, New Mexico. According to mapquest it should take about 8 hours to make the drive and our stop in New Mexico will put us in the Mountain time zone so around 5PM allowing an hour for stops along the way we should be pulling in for the night. 562 of those miles will have been on scenic IH10 through a whole lot of not so pretty West Texas.

Saturday morning (10/3) we will leave Las Cruces (again I'm shooting for an 8AMish wheels rolling time) booking it for Palm Springs, California. This drive will be one of the longest planned at around 660 miles and about 9.5 hours. We will drive through a good bit of New Mexico and all of Arizona (passing through Tucson and Phoenix) into California around Blythe, CA again changing timezones to Pacific. We should roll into Palm Springs AROUND 5:30PM Pacific if we again allow as much as an hour along the way for eats and breaks. We will log another 643 or so miles on IH10 on this leg.

Sunday morning (10/4) we head for our destination San Luis Obispo, California. Still a 5 hour drive logging 308 miles or so. We are supposed to attend a welcome dinner at the Siminoff Lutherie Camp Sunday evening at 5:30PM so we should have PLENTY of time to find the hotel, locate a place for groceries, identify some spots for Carolyn to scope out during the week and get to the dinner. I expect to arrive in SLO around 2PM if the traffic through the Los Angeles area and up Hwy 101 isn't too slow. We only get 70 miles of IH10 on this leg. We pass North of LA going through Pasadena and pick up Hwy 101 just North of Studio City and West of Burbank. We have 190 miles on Hwy 101 and I must remember to take my Scopolomine (sea sickness med) for this drive ... in the 1980's I drove along the coast up Hwy 1 North of San Francisco and got sicker than a dog ... maybe 101 won't be so curvey! We drive North along the coast from Ventura through Santa Barbara.

Once we "get there" we only have about 1800+ miles to drive to get back home ... gonna need new tires on MiniRita after this trip!!!

Whaaaaahooooooo .... On The Road Again ....