jeepin.jason

Well, we hit the road bright and early at 5:30AM and met up with the rest of our group (4 vehicles total) at 6AM. Ok, so maybe it wasn’t so bright—we drove in thick fog until after 9AM. Overall though the drive really wasn’t that bad.

Once we got west of Fort Worth is was fast cruisin’ through west Texas… which if you haven’t driven through there… is just flat, and more flat, then some oil wells, and then more flat… until you finally get to the foot hills and mountains of the Pecos area. The terrain is still desolate semi-desert, but it’s definitely more interesting that staring at at an endless flat horizon. Of course, my wife and her mom slept in the back of the Denali for most of the drive, and for about an hour or two after lunch, everyone in the truck was asleep but me. Thankfully that was about the time we hit the hill country with the more interesting scenery.

We arrived in Las Cruces, NM, after almost exactly 10 hours on the road. Considering we stopped for gas three times and spent nearly an hour for lunch at a little steak house in some po-dunk town, I think we made excellent time.

Of course, we were also pushing 70-75mph most of the way, and our Denali XL was averaging a whopping 6mpg most of the time. One of the guys in our group was towing with a brand new Ram 2500 Cummins, and I was really wishing for his motor. On flatlands or hills, he could have easily left us behind, all while getting probably 2x the mileage we were. Oh well, Dodge doesn’t have a full size SUV, and other than the Excursion, there’s no fullsize diesel SUV’s.

Once we got to Las Cruces we headed straight to the fairgrounds to check in for the Chile Challenge. We got our registration sent in late, so we didn’t get all the trails with our friends that we wanted, but we may still be able to get on them depending on how many folks actually show up at the morning line-ups. Man there were some slick rigs (both trail and tow) at the fairgrounds, I hope I get the chance to see some of them (the trail rigs of course) out on the trails.

Pics from the drive and registration are on my flickr account.