NV, AZ, NM, TX, & OK Roadtrip for Valentine's & Sean's 30th Bday! 2/14/15 - 2/25/15

Day 1 - 2/14/15 (Valentine's Day!):

We started today off right, staying up past midnight the night before, making and eating bacon sandwiches, and drinking beer and wine while watching Bleach til going to sleep at 4am! We were up again at 8:42am though and spent the day working in preparation for our roadtrip. The occasion: Valentine's Day and Sean's 30th birthday! We weren't completely sure where we were going yet but we thought about it throughout the day til we finally decided: towards Albuquerque, NM and go from there! Before leaving though, we went to Sam's Town where JJ was working, said hi to him, and traded off on a few ITG credits to celebrate Valentine's. Then we went home to "relieve some stress" (I gave Sean a bj while he watched porn and then I touched myself) and spend another 6 hours getting everything in order before finally saying goodbye to Danny and the dogs and driving off at 9:35pm!

Around 10pm, we saw the former Hacienda Casino by Lake Mead. It was currently in the process of transforming into the Hoover Dam Lodge. It wasn't open during renovation but they had a Dotty's there that was open for business. We took a few pics and then continued onward, snacking on roadtrip foods on the way!

Shortly after that, we stopped at a scenic lookout to peer out into the darkness and at the infinite stars. It's was so dark, peaceful, and quiet. A bit chilly but so nice!

In Kingman, AZ, we filled our missing half tank of gas with about $15.50 and used the restrooms at the TA Travel Center we visit whenever we're in the area.

Nowhere else looked enticing enough or big enough to warrant stopping til Flagstaff, AZ but in Flagstaff there was one ddrfreak listed machine location, last updated in 2007:

Harkins Theatres
1959 S Woodlands Village Blvd
Flagstaff, AZ

We got into Flagstaff around 3am local time (2am Vegas time) and drove to Harkins knowing in was closed but figuring we'd check that the place was still there and see whether we could tell if the DDR machine (supposedly an Extreme) was still there. Harkins was indeed there and still had an arcade, though we couldn't see inside, so we decided to get wifi to help us decide how to spend our night as we waited for Harkins to open at 9am.

Driving a short distance to find wifi, we spotted a Peter Piper Pizza. We peeked inside but there were no music games to be found. They did have wifi though! We used it and found some cool things to do in the area but couldn't decide on anything in particular so we just drove around for a bit til we found an apartment complex that looked like a safe and quiet enough place for us to spend the night/morning and parked and went to sleep in the passengers seat at 5am local time.

Day 2 - 2/15/15:

We were TIRED so we didn't wake up til 1pm local time. When we did wake up, the sky was super blue and the day was a little cold but very sunny! We could see our surroundings much better and everything looked pretty and peaceful. There were tall trees spread out in various areas and mountains in the distance in some directions, even some with snow on the tips.

We needed to get washed up a bit so we drove to a nearby Albertson's. After that, we checked out what seemed to be the only bowling alley in the area: Starlite Lanes. It was a bit small and didn't have any music games but they did have a small arcade and the place looked cool and busy enough.

At 3pm, we got back to Harkins Theatres and finally went inside. The arcade was in a separate room at the front of the theater before ticket sales. Inside though, the only music game they currently had was Guitar Hero. It sucked because we were both really craving some DDR and because I didn't want to have to delete another ddrfreak machine location but oh well, life goes on. Lol

We were at half a tank or so again so we filled up at the Maverik station down the street. I'd guessed it awhile back when I mentioned in a blog post that gas had hit the lowest I'd seen it in all my adult years and that I didn't think it'd get much lower. About 2 days after that post, it quickly started going up again. At $2.09/gallon of regular unleaded (87) gas though, Maverik wasn't far off that lowest Vegas price I'd seen when I made that post and was by far the cheapest gas price I'd seen in the past several weeks. Our Maverik card was supposed to make it $0.02 cheaper per gallon too but didn't seem to be working at the pump and we were too lazy to find out why. We filled the tank again with only $16 though and got back on the road towards Albuquerque.

We saw a turnoff for some Walnut Canyon National Monument thing and decided to exit the freeway for a quick look. There was a small park entry fee but the pay booth was closed with a sign up saying to pay at the visitor center instead. We didn't have time to stay and explore though so we just went in for a quick look, parked, and peeked out at a breathtaking view from the canyon overlook we found there.

A little bit later, we saw a Navajo casino called Twin Arrows and exited for a look. The place looked pretty up-to-date and cool and was a decent-sized hotel and casino. They had free self-serve drinks too! Sean got a soda and hot water to make a tea with. (He always has his own supplies!) I got a coffee. Yum! The hotel portion had a game room where we hoped to find a dance game but when we got inside the whole place was just console games! :( Sooooo weird, unexpected, and depressing!

About 20 miles before Winslow, AZ, I think it was, there were signs for a meteor crater 6 miles off the freeway. We reeeeally wanted to see the crater so we exited but soon saw a sign saying access to the crater was closed for the day. There was a weird looking Mobil gas station near the sign so Sean went in and asked for details. Turns out you can only access the crater from 8am-5pm daily and it was already 5:30. Oh well, something to do on the return trip?

A minute down the road was the Meteor Crater rest area. We pulled of for restroom breaks and had a look around. The landscape in the area was awesome!

Just after that was an abandoned Meteor Crater trading post gift shop. We'd passed a lot of really interesting abandoned buildings along the way but so far this trading post was by far the most unique of them. We wanted to stop and look but saw it just a little too late so maybe another time.

We passed through Winslow just after 6pm. It was a decent sized town with McDonald's, Walmart, Sonic, Flying J, Love's, and tons of other chains as well as local places. It took a few minutes to drive through town and we considered stopping for a look around but nothing in particular stood out to us at the time so we kept going.

We saw a TA Travel Center in or near Holbrook, AZ and pulled off to check it out. Surprisingly, they didn't have an arcade at all. We used the opportunity to eat some food we'd brought with us before driving onward though.

We reached the New Mexico state line at 8pm.

About 20 minutes later, we got to Gallup, NM and stopped at a TA Travel Center we found. They had a music-game-free arcade but had a sale on some yummy Snyder's hot buffalo wing pretzel pieces so we got a bag each and got Sean a $1 lottery ticket. For some reason, he likes to get a lottery ticket in each new place we go. Personally, I wouldn't waste the money but he likes it. Lol

There was one listed dance game location in Gallup. The location: Tilt Arcade at the Rio West Mall. We drove to see if it was still there but the mall was closed when we arrived. We couldn't check if Tilt still had a machine but we were able to confirm with a security guard driving around the lot that Tilt was still in business inside the mall.

We drove to McDonald's just down the street after that to get some caffeine and some wifi. Sean got a tea and I got a coffee and we sat down to research Gallup. We didn't see anything else of interest in the area but we used the wifi to get a little online work done and handle our finances a bit. While sitting there, some drunk guy came up to us and gave us his uneaten meal he'd just bought before getting kicked out of the place. O_o He refused to take his meal back when we said we didn't want it so we were stuck. We didn't want to waste it but were grossed out by the fries so we tossed the fries outside for the birds, trashed the soda, and took the unwrapped Big Mac and cheeseburger to the car for desperate times that might occur later in the night. Lol

At a gas station across the street from McDonald's, we filled the tank back up with $17.63. It was $2.07/gallon for a random gas grade of 86 at the time!

Back en route, we stopped in Church Rock to look in a movie theater we saw called Red Rock 10. They were closed so we couldn't be completely positive but we didn't think we saw any music games amongst the few arcade games they had in their lobby.

Off the freeway just after that, we saw a casino. It looked amusing but was too inconvenient to get to by the time we saw it.

Around 11:20pm, we drove through a town called Grants that looked very spread out. There were some hotel chains, a McDonald's, a Denny's, some truck stops, and other stuff there but nothing to convince us to stop.

Not long after that, we spotted a casino called Sky City Casino Hotel. It was kind of small but had an arcade, free drinks, and free play (between $5 and $1,000) for new members. The arcade didn't have any music games but we got drinks from their awesome soft drink machine (raspberry Powerade for me and some random soda for Sean) and signed up for their players club. We got $45 in free play for signing up including $5 as an early birthday gift for Sean. After gambling it all, we cashed out with $57.75 in free money!! Wow.. Very much worth the stop! I almost felt bad for the casino til on our way out we noticed lots of people blowing lots of money on slots. Guess I can see why they can afford to give us all that free money!

Shortly after getting back on the freeway, we found another casino called Dancing Eagle. We popped in quickly but the tiny place didn't have an arcade or freeplay or anything noteworthy that we noticed. Across the street though, there was a place with good gas prices called Route 66 travel center. We didn't need gas but we went in to look around and check for an arcade. No arcade but they had assorted Blue Bell ice creams for $0.50 each so Sean got a Heath ice cream!

Finally approaching Albuquerque shortly after that, we spotted the first ddrfreak machine location listed in the area:

Kids Quest/Cyber Quest (inside Route 66 Casino)
14500 Central SW
Albuquerque, NM

Before going in though, we looked around inside another Route 66 travel center right by the casino. The travel center looked pretty neat and even had its own little casino inside but no arcade.

Route 66 Casino, on the other hand, was the biggest casino we'd seen this trip and one of the coolest-looking casinos we'd seen EVER! They had free drinks and even still had the Kids Quest with the DDR Supernova 2 ddrfreak's 2011 update for the place said they would. It was a dedicated Supernova 2 cabinet too. So rare! Kids Quest was closed and, of course, Sean and I were too old to enter anyway so we were super frustrated but also happy just to finally have seen our first dance game this trip. There was an all ages arcade, called Cyber Quest, adjacent to the Kids Quest too. It was closed and didn't appear to have any dance games inside but they did have a Guitar Hero machine. We snapped a bunch of pics of the arcade and casino, got some drinks in the casino, and used free wifi they had there before heading out again.

At 3:30am, we arrived at our chosen car parking/sleeping spot for the night: Flying J travel center on the outskirts of Albuquerque. At $1.99/gallon of regular unleaded gas, it was the new cheapest gas price we'd seen this trip and tied with the cheapest price in Vegas back when I'd made that blog post! Even better though, the parking spot we found overlooked the glittering city lights of Albuquerque so we had a beautiful view to fall asleep to!

Sitting there, we watched an episode of Bleach on Sean's laptop and then got comfy under the blankets to go to sleep in the front seats. Sean was too horny to sleep though so we both played with ourselves til I finished and then I finished him off with my mouth. Yay free calories! Finally, we managed to get to sleep around 4:30 or so.

Day 3 - 2/16/15:

We woke up lots of times to readjust but I finally got up for the last time at 11:17am and woke Sean a few minutes later. Then we went inside Flying J to get cleaned up and dressed. This Flying J was pretty big and even had a big Denny's attached to it. There were arcade games in the front of Denny's as well as down the other end of Flying J but no music games.

At 12:30pm, we starred towards the first destination we'd chosen for the day:

Golfernoggins
4910 Lomas Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM

Since we hadn't played any dance games yet this trip, we thought we'd try starting off strong with an ITG2 machine. Golfernoggins seemed like the best place and the location's last ddrfreak update had been 11/5/11 (recent for ddrfreak) so we thought it'd be more likely to be there than most places. When we arrived though, it was nowhere to be found! The address 4910 went to 2 suites in a shopping center building: A and B. Suite A was a Dollar General. We asked about Golfernoggins inside the Dollar General and they said it'd been next door in suite B and had closed down maybe 3 years or so prior. :( In its place was now a Buffalo Exchange type thrift store place called FSG Resale. We went inside to look around and the place was pretty interesting but definitely no Golfernoggins. So sad... Yet another ddrfreak machine location deletion.

Since we were already there, we had a peek in the big pet store next to FSG.  It was a really cool store with lots of cute and interesting animals!

We started towards another dance game location after that but spotted a mall off the freeway on the way. Some of the other machine locations were in malls and malls frequently have machines so we exited to see if this was one of them. Entering the mall parking lot though, we saw a Dave and Buster's and stopped to check it out first.

Dave and Buster's
2100 Louisiana Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM

Inside we found a Guitar Hero and a PIU Fiesta 2 TX cabinet! We each played a song from a credit someone left in Fiesta 2 and then used game cards we had from other Dave and Buster's locations to trade off on 4 more credits (3 songs per credit at a cost of 5.8 points/credit). After that, we got a video of the place to go along with all the pics we'd already taken, found one more partial credit left in PIU, and traded off on 2 last songs! I don't usually keep track of PIU scores AT ALL but I happened to notice that we each got a couple of decent ones this time including me getting an S with 6 greats and 2 goods on Chopsticks doubles 16 despite not looking at the screen at the start of the song. :p We found a few tickets around the arcade, loaded them onto the card to save for later, and finally headed out around 4:20pm. Though it's not a 4 panel dance game location, I added Dave and Buster's to ddrfreak when I got wifi later in case any other dance gamers use ddrfreak and want to check it out sometime.

Upon further inspection, the mall-Winrock Town Center I believe-didn't appear to be completed and open for business yet and didn't have a listed dance game machine location anyway. There was a Regal Cinemas Stadium 16 theater by it but we checked inside and found arcade games but no music games.

Right by there, however, were a couple of other shopping centers including the Coronado Center mall. There was supposed to be a dance game machine location there with DDR Extreme, PIU NX, and Dance Freaks:

Tilt (at Coronado Center Mall)
6600 Menaul Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM

We went in to find it but didn't see it on the directory and when we asked mall employees they told us the arcade was long since closed down. There were no other arcades in the mall either. Dang...Goodbye to another location. :/

The trip in wasn't a complete waste though. We got to go into a pet store in the mall and look at some funny cats, dogs, and bunnies and we went in a candy store and got $4.62 worth of expensive candies we hadn't had before or don't have often.

We were finally back on track to our next destination after that:

Nickel City (at Hinkle Family Fun Center)
12931 Indian School Rd NE
Albuquerque, NM

When we arrived, there were actually 3 potential machine locations in one parking lot: a United Artists movie theater, Hinkle Family Fun Center (pretty much like a Boomers), and Nickel City, which was part of Hinkle Family Fun Center although located across the parking lot from the main building. There were only a couple of arcade games in the theater and no music games. There were no music games in the main Hinkle Family Fun Center building either but the Nickel City there claimed to still have a DDR machine. According to ddrfreak's last update for the place on 5/23/07, they'd had DDR Extreme, ITG1, and drummania 10th mix. We couldn't see inside the place, since admission was $2.50 per person, game cards (to play the arcade games with )had a $5 minimum load amount, and we didn't want to pay that much when we didn't know the condition of the machine and didn't want to stay long. The attendant told us they only had one dance game, which she though was DDR Extreme, now though and that they'd gotten rid of the other (probably ITG). We didn't ask about drummania. We saw a couple of old video clips of the dance games on a repeating video playing on the flat screen monitor there but that was the only look we could get without paying. Overall, the whole area was really cool. It had mini golf, laser tag, paintball, a theater, an arcade with lots of new games, a nickel arcade which I'm assuming contained the older games, and more. Not worth it for dance gamers like us just wanting to pop in for a quick credit though. I updated ddrfreak with the info I had to the best of my abilities and we moved on.

The next place we planned to go was actually a casino without a ddrfreak-listed machine location but on the way to it we saw a bowling alley called Holiday Bowl and went in to look for dance games. There weren't any music games at all there but there were a few other arcade games and the place was pretty busy.

Across the street was another bowling alley called Skidz Family Entertainment Center. Not sure the reason behind the name but it was pretty much like Holiday Bowl but with a slightly bigger arcade but still no music games.

On the road again, we found yet another new lowest gas price. At $1.92/gallon of 87, we had to top up and for just $13.77 to do it why not?!

We got to our intended destination a few minutes later. The place was called The Downs Racetrack and Casino. I think it was the first casino I'd been to with a racetrack. Being around 8:30pm, the racetrack wasn't open at the time but we could see it a bit behind and to the right of the casino. The casino itself didn't have an arcade or anything of interest to us but it was cool just to see. Also, they had a dress code so to get into the main casino bit, which was just a fairly small gambling area, we would've had to change our clothes. Not worth it! Lol

A couple minutes from there was the next potential dance game location:

Albuquerque Indoor Karting
5 11 Copper Ave NE
Albuquerque, NM

When we arrived they were closed though and we couldn't see in through the windows. Apparently they were on winter hours and closed on Mondays. Oh well.

We passed through part of downtown Albuquerque on the way to the next location. We weren't yet sure what the rest of downtown looked like but the area we drove through was pretty much like typical small town 1-story downtown areas with a good number of lights.

Century 14 Downtown Albuquerque
100 Central Ave SW
Albuquerque, NM

^This was the next location and the first one that actually had an accessible machine out of all those listed on ddrfreak that we'd visited so far this trip! The machine had a dark screen and graffiti on it and it wasn't much to look at but the pads were actually pretty good! Both sides gave occasional non-combos, especially on their right arrows, but I was able to AA stuff while playing in socks on both sides. Overall not shabby at all! It was $1(4 tokens) for 3 songs but extra stage was on so not an awful deal and either way we were just grateful to have found a machine there!

On the way to the next place, we saw a Whataburger!

The next place was:

Lucky 66 Bowling Alley
6132 4th St NW
Albuquerque, NM

It's last ddrfreak location update was 4/1/05 and said they had ITG1. We were guessing ITG1 wasn't there anymore and thinking it might either be upgraded to ITG2, DDR Supernova or newer, or completely removed but we couldn't check when we got there because apparently they'd closed early for the night. The hours on their door said they'd be open til 11pm but it wasn't even 10pm local time yet and they were closed.

We had another Century movie theater next:

Century Rio 24
4901 Pan American West Fwy NE
Albuquerque, NM

Inside, the arcade was behind ticketing in the lobby. It didn't matter though. We asked and we're told that they'd definitely removed the DDR machine, last known as DDR X according to ddrfreak's 2011 update for the place, and didn't have any dance games at all anymore. We could still see a Guitar Hero machine in the arcade but didn't see any dance games. We couldn't see the entire arcade from the entrance or side door but the employees seemed sure enough so we hesitantly deleted the location from ddrfreak.

The next place we headed to was another casino we'd seen when looking up places to visit, things to do, and potential machine locations in the area:

Sandia Resort and Casino
30 Rainbow Rd
Albuquerque, NM

They didn't have an arcade but they had $25 free slot or table play for new members, free drinks (coffee, hot chocolate, sodas, orange juice, and cranberry juice), lots of good food deals, free wifi, and a hot tub that was, at least at the time, easily accessible to any guests whether they were staying in a room there or not! I assume the hot tub was meant for guests renting a room but there wasn't a sign saying one way or the other or even a sign showing the hot tub area hours. We signed up for the players club, got all kinds of drinks, gambled our freeplay, came out with $41 in free money, got our swimwear and wash up stuff from the car, and hot tubbed! We were the only ones in the hot tub area so we washed our hair, shaved, scrubbed, and totally cleaned off, though inconspicuously and in the most classy way possible for such a thing. Haha We didn't feel dirty anyway but figured we should take advantage. Besides, it'd save us getting a truck stop shower in the morning instead. After washing, we relaxed in the hot tub for a good while longer before security came out and said the hot tub area was actually supposed to be closed as of 10pm. (It was about 12:20am at the time.) He was super polite and even apologetic though. In fact, all the employees who spoke to us in that casino were extremely nice! We decided it was our favorite casino on the trip so far. It was also probably the largest so far. After our hot tub dip, we relaxed on the cozy couches in the expansive halls of the meeting/banquet room area and used the wifi there for a bit while drinking coffee and cold drinks. We wanted to get some $2 burgers they sold there but also wanted to go to Waffle House, which was also apparently in the area, and knew we wouldn't have room for both. We did get a couple last drinks though. It was crazy, they had drink stations scattered all around the casino and even had employees walking carts around the casino to bring drinks to gamblers playing on the casino floor. The casino really looked like they had lots of money but it was welcoming and the people were so kind. Strange but amazing and highly recommended for anyone looking for a place to visit while in Albuquerque!

We drove to one of the two Albuquerque area Waffle Houses next. We were amazed to find that that not only were their prices pretty good overall but they had some amazing deals on the menu too! We got 2 delicious burgers for $1 each and some random sausage, egg, and cheese grits bowl (better than you might think!) for another $3. The burgers came with some new and tasty Waffle House chipotle sort of sauce I'd never seen before too. We were very satisfied and full off of just $5 worth of food plus tax! The waitress had chatted with us and given us some good company to go with our meal so we tipped her $3 and still ended up spending less than anyone would expect for even one person in a restaurant!

Finally, we drove to:

Fun Connection
11000 Broadway SE
Albuquerque, NM

Fun Connection was last updated on ddrfreak on 11/5/11 as a DDR Extreme location. We knew the location would be closed when we arrived but the stand-alone building was in the same parking lot as, and also owned by, yet another casino. The casino had been a Hard Rock casino but was now called Isleta. We figured we'd scope it out at night, decide whether to go back in in the morning, spend the night in the parking lot, and then check out Fun Connection. The players club was closed for the night in Isleta but the casino, which was perhaps of similar size to and as fancy as the Sandia and Route 66 casinos, did have cool soda machines, various cold tea flavors, coffees, and hot chocolate. We also saw a few signs for good food deals. We looked around and took some pics before going back to the car to find a good spot in the parking lot to get some rest.

Back in the car, we got ready for sleep and watched a couple episodes of Bleach before cuddling up and finally getting to sleep around 4:30am.

Day 4 - 2/17/15:

The cold had woken us up quite a few times in the night when a body part accidentally slipped out from under the blanket but we managed to readjust and get back to sleep. It was actually REALLY cold there at night and really chilly even during the day. The car had been frosting over a bit in the night too. Coming from a warm Vegas with the impression that Arizona and New Mexico were both equally hot, we hadn't packed much warm clothing despite it still being winter. We each had a jacket and a couple pairs of pants but that was about it. We were okay but did get a few people laughing at us for our attire and had been feeling the cold more or less the entire time since getting out of the car in Flagstaff and through all of New Mexico so far.

I finally got up at 11:32am. Sean was up 12 minutes later. The day time view from where we parked in the Isleta parking lot was awesome!

We got changed and ready for the day and then went into the casino to use the restrooms and sign up for the players club. They gave us cool mardi gras beads when we signed up and Sean won a couple of funny gifts (ice scraper and pouch) while I won $5 in free play. We got some sweet tea, soda, and coffee and sat down to gamble our freeplay. When we were done, we had $4.50 in free money and lots of goodies to take home with us. So far we'd actually made more money than we'd spent this trip!

Back at the car, we drove across the parking lot to Fun Connection to check on the DDR Extreme machine there. Sean had heartburn though so he took some pills and we hung out in the car doing a bit of work before going inside.

We finally went in at 2:36pm. The place was really a unique-looking bowling alley with laser tag, an arcade, and other things but we were sad to see that they'd taken their Extreme machine out and only seemed to have newer games in the arcade area now. We got some pics and a video, cashed some tickets we found in for toy army men, and deleted the location from ddrfreak. :(

We drove back to Albuquerque Indoor Karting after that. Not only were they open this time but they had Guitar Hero and an OpenITG dedicab!! ITG had quite a few packs on it, especially some easier ones, but the pads weren't amazing. I managed to get through 8 Miles Through the Fire and Flames (14) first song on the better 2P side but neither of us could step hard enough to make the pads work for Streamline (15) second song so we failed. Afterward, I wanted to try some easier barless stuff to see if that would work but Sean was too frustrated by the pads to bother so we continued on.

Next stop was:

Peter Piper Pizza
3109 San Mateo Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM

They were supposed to have an ITG2 machine as well, according to their last ddrfreak update on 8/31/10, but when we arrived they didn't have any dance or music games inside anymore so we had to delete the location from ddrfreak.

We got to the yummiest machine location of the trip after that!:

IT'Z
4595 San Mateo Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM

Several ddrfreak-listed machine locations were on San Mateo Blvd, actually. This one had last been updated on 11/8/09 and was supposed to have DDR Supernova 2 and drummania. It was a pizza buffet, just like John's Incredible Pizza, so we had to pay to get in but they had a Tuesday deal: $4/person for the buffet or $5/person with a drink. There was a $5 minumum load amount for game cards and a $0.50 activation fee. We both got the buffet, both got drinks, and got a $5 game card and paid $16 or so total. Not a bad deal! We scoped the arcade out as soon as we got inside and found the Supernova 2 mentioned on ddrfreak as well as a Guitar Hero, a PIU Pro machine, and a Percussion Freaks 5th Mix, which we guessed was what the person who'd listed the machine location as having Supernova 2 and drummania was talking about! We ate first and got suuuuper full and then went back into the arcade to burn it off! Supernova 2 was 3 credits ($0.75)/3 songs with joint premium on but someone had left a credit in so we played together for free. The pads weren't sensitive at all though and the screen had been replaced with a small flat screen. It was hard to figure out the timing on the machine with the new monitor and the pads being far from the screen. (Pads were stuck that way as there was a wooden platform between the pads and the machine, probably for safety reasons.) We were happy to have seen and tried the machine but we decided to use all of our credits on PIU Pro instead. We played through our $5, playing together on one credit and taking turns on the rest, and even added another $1 on so we'd be able to play through all of our credits. The machine and pads were actually really good! I'd never played much Pro but I guess I'd been getting a bit better at PIU because  Sean wasn't the only one to get new PIU scores this time. I actually managed to full combo Kiss Me (S10) and Hi-Bi (S11?). Then we got some more drink and some jell-o and finally left the place around 8pm.

Just a few seconds further down the road was another ddrfreak location:

Putt Putt
5100 Dan Mateo Blvd NE
Albuquerque,  NM

The location had been updated last on 9/15/08 with a DDR Supernova 2 but when we got inside there were no dance or music games in the arcade at all. Seemed to be a theme going with most of the arcades. Guess most dance games were just getting too old and problematic to maintain. The attendant at Putt Putt was super nice but said that had been the case with DDR-that it'd just kept breaking and wasn't worth it to keep fixing. Well, at least we knew. We got some pics and a vids of the cool-looking little place and took off.

We tried to go back to the Lucky 66 Bowling Alley after that but it was closed again. We noticed a sign on the door this time that said they were closed due to power outage though. On the bright side, at least that meant they probably weren't closed for good.

Cottonwood Mall
10000 Coors Blvd Byp NW
Albuquerque, NM

^This location was supposed to have a DDR Extreme according to ddrfreak's 1/5/08 update for it but we scoured the entire mall and didn't find any music games or even an arcade til we got to the Regal movie theater there. The theater was attached to the mall and at the entrance to it from the mall was a darkly-lit arcade but no music games inside. I asked the ticketing attendant and he said that that arcade had been the mall's DDR machine location, that there hadn't been any others in the mall, that he used to play on that DDR machine, and that he'd just gone in to play it one day and it was gone with no explanation. Sad. Yet another ddrfreak machine location deletion.

We passed a Cinemark movie theater on the way to the next place but were already getting on the freeway so we decided to continue on our way and go back to Cinemark after.

The next spot was:

Peter Piper Pizza
9260 Golf Course Rd NW
Albuquerque, NM

With their last ddrfreak location update being on 11/24/06 though and considering our luck so far, we weren't surprised when we got inside and didn't find any music games. Luckily, we found 8 tickets and got a few little candies so I guess it was still kinda worth the trip, despite having to delete the place from ddrfreak.

Back at the Cinemark theater, which was called Movies West and appeared to be one of those cheap movie theaters that played movies that were just being taken out of other theaters, we found an array of games in the lobby but no music games. With $1 movie Mondays though, it was still a cool place.

We were done with Albuquerque dance game locations then. We'd at least tried to visit every one listed on ddrfreak so we decided to go and find the next closest town with one! Our findings:

Santa Ana Star Casino
54 Jemez Dam Rd
Bernallio, NM

Bernallio only had one machine location but when we arrived there we actually found the DDR Supernova mentioned in the location's last update from 4/27/05 sitting in the bowling alley's arcade there! It was the only arcade in the casino and that machine was the only music game in the arcade. I think the bowling alley had just closed when we walked in at 10:06pm so the employees wouldn't let us play but they let us have a quick look. That was good enough for me. I was just haply to be able to verify they still had a working machine! After that, we got free drinks from the relatively large casino's many drink stations and signed up for their players club, getting free lanyards, a hat, and $2 in free play. Finally, we sat down with our drinks to use the casino's wifi and figure out where we wanted to go next. After researching for a bit, we decided to drive towards the state capital, Santa Fe!

We'd mapped out a few dance game locations and casinos on the way and in the vicinity of Santa Fe so we could easily find places to go and things to do without much backtracking. The first place we'd found was just 12 miles from where we were so we got there in no time. The place: San Felipe Casino. It was a smaller casino, probably just a bit smaller than Poker Palace in Vegas. They had quite a few free drink stations though that even had grapefruit juice, apple juice, and hot tea - a first for any casinos so far this trip. They also had a vending machine with a few decently-priced snacks. We were pretty full of free drinks but we tried the grapefruit and apple juices and then used the vending machine to get a mini bag of hot Cheetos for $0.35 and some Flamin' Hot peanuts for $0.55.

We'd hardly spent anything on food so far this trip. It was crazy! We'd brought a lot of canned and other food with us from Vegas and it was really lasting us well and saving us a lot of time and money. Half the time it was at least as appealing to eat as the food at restaurants near us and the selection we'd brought was probably at least as healthy, getting in all the food groups, as well!

We got to Santa Fe around 1am or so but figured we'd save exploring the little city, which had a population of about 67,000 (more or less as populated as my home town of Merced, CA), for day time hours when things would be open. In the meantine, we continued exploring casinos.

The next casino we reached was Camel Rock Casino. They had a sign at the entrance to the property saying they didn't allow any cameras on the premises so it was tough for us to get away with taking any pics. We got a couple though. Luckily, this kind of neat, different casino which had a couple of beverage machines and not a lot else of interest to us was pretty small and didn't have anything that we desperately needed pics of. The most noteworthy thing was probably Sobe Lifewater in their drink machines as it was the first casino we'd seen it in this trip. We got a little of that and some half and half to drink and then left.

Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino, which was actually a Hilton hotel, was next. It was a huge place and looked amazing from the outside, like huge and fancy puebles. It looked equally amazing and fancy inside too! Down one of the long upstairs corridors, they even had a 24 hour arcade! The arcade didn't have any music games but it had a great atmosphere so we decided to hang out there briefly. The machines varied in quality but a couple of the older shooting games had partial credits in so we put a quarter in each and I watched as Sean played. One of the two machines he played had a coin jam at the time but we managed to get it out and profited a couple of dollars by doing so! Back in the casino, we got some more free beverages including some French vanilla hot chocolate since we'd never seen it before.

It was SO COLD outside!!!!! Seriously, we'd even started seeing snow on the ground in some areas as well as on the tips of mountains surrounding us. We were SO underprepared but we made it work somehow.

Cities of Gold hotel and casino was just a couple of minutes north of Buffalo Thunder and was linked with it as well. It was tiny though and way less fancy. It didn't seem to have a lot of business or money but was nice enough. They had free beverages like the others and had a bowling alley attached to the casino. The bowling alley supposedly had an arcade but was closed at the time. We were told by several employees, however, that they didn't have any dance games in the arcade there.

Just down the street was a McDonald's. I was so cold that any hot food sounded incredible to me. We drove to the drive thru and saw something we'd never seen on on a McDonald's menu before: a "green chile double cheeseburger" for $2. Come to think of it, lots of places in the area had "green chile" menu items. Not sure why they spelled "chili" as "chile" but it was an interesting difference. I'd actually gotten a slice of pizza at the buffet earlier with mysterious green bits on it. After ordering a couple of the green chili double cheeseburgers and a regular cheeseburger for us, I saw that the green bits from my pizza earlier were the same as the ones on the burgers. They were similar in taste to the peppers you can get from In-N-Out except that they weren't spicy. They just added a hint of flavor to otherwise normal foods.

We drove back to Buffalo Thunder then and got ready for bed, wearing the warmest things we had. We watched a couple of Bleach episodes and finally cuddled and went to sleep a little after 5am.

Day 5 - 2/18/15:

I woke up at 11:24am and wondered whether to get up or not. At 11:51am, I finally decided I might as well. We went into Buffalo Thunder again and got changed, washed up, and ready for the day. We got some soda and juice in the casino and did a couple of little photo shoots of me to sell for extra money (we already had plenty pics of just the place as well as LOTS of other places to sell) and then moved along.

Our next destination was back a bit south and was the only ddrfreak-listed dance game location in New Mexico's capital city, Santa Fe:

Quiggy's Putt and Play
6700 Cerrillos Rd
Santa Fe, NM

According to ddrfreak's last update for the place on 11/5/11, they were supposed to have ITG2. When we got there though, the place had been turned into a big furniture store. The employees there said they'd gotten the building from Quiggy's when Quiggy's closed down about 5 years prior. Obviously, it hadn't been quite 5 years but it had probably closed shortly after the last ddrfreak update for it. :(

Funny notes: We hadn't seen any 99 Cent Stores this trip and the GPS said there weren't any for over 300 miles. Also, most of the buildings and houses in the area looked kind of like little pueblos or sand castles. It was a bit different from what we were used to. After some research, we discovered it was an intentional thing they'd done in the area to help inspire tourism. They'd actually passed an ordinance with certain requirements pertaining to it.

Down the street from us was a Regal Cinemas 14. We checked it for music games but didn't find any amongst their other games. While there though, some guy in the parking lot asked if we'd sell him our car. Lol No way! Why do people always ask?

Across the street from there was the Santana Fe Place mall. No arcades there but they did have some snow in front!

We discovered that Santa Fe was 7,200 feet above sea level and was accordingly the highest state capital in the United States. That explained the cold and snow. Apparently, an average summer day in Santa Fe only has a high of 86 degrees! Santa Fe is also the oldest state capital in the United States. Interesting!

We got to downtown Santa Fe just after that. Aside from the continuing pueblo-like architecture, downtown Santa Fe was pretty much just like any other small, quiet town's downtown area. There were a couple of souvenir shops, a few cafes that had already started closing around 5pm, a bunch of art galleries, quite a few antique stores, a couple of museums, churches, extremely small indoor shopping plazas, other misc places. There wasn't a lot going on there but it was cool to walk around and check out. If we hadn't stopped in anywhere, I think it would've taken about 10 minutes to walk around and see everything. We went in a few places though. In one gift shop, we got a $3 New Mexico shot glass and a bag of garden salsa Sun Chips. We also found a shop like none we'd ever seen before. It was a salt, oil, and vinegar shop with tons of flavors of each and free samples too. We had a look inside and sampled some cherry chocolate, jalapeño and fig, and other vinegars and Santa Fe oil. It was all completely unlike anything we'd tried before but all tasty too! We were pretty done with downtown by 6pm so we went back to the car and figured out our next plan of action.

We decided on Lubbock, TX! O_O We felt like we'd experienced New Mexico properly and it was time to move on. Colorado was too cold, Mexico was too complicated (with Sean's VISA thing processing), and all that was really left to see around us was Texas. I hadn't been back to Lubbock since I moved there in 2006. Wow... Guess it was finally time!

Just after starting on our way, we were hungry. We saw a Phillips 66 gas station and stopped in. They had a good amount of hot food including various hot dogs and green chile chicken tamales. At a cost of $2/2, we got a black pepper hot dog for me and a chorizo one for Sean. We also tried to buy a $1.19 or $2/2 tamale but the cashier didn't bother charging us for it and actually gave us a second tamale for free as well. Crazy! The hot dogs were pretty good and the tamales were a little bit plain but also good, especially with sauce. Best of all, we'd gotten it all half price!

We'd been driving through the middle of nowhere for a little while when we reached a Phillips 66 travel center that said Clines Corners on it. I guess that must've been the name of the area. Gas was pricier than we'd recently gotten used to but stations in the area were scarce and we needed a little to get us to the next stop. We put $10 om the tank and went inside for a look around. The place was much bigger than it'd seemed from the outside. Though it was closed at the time, they had a restaurant on one end. At the other end was a somewhat typical convenience store but with fireworks and a few odd snacks for sale. The rest of the place primarily consisted of tons of gifts, souvenirs, and trinkets with a good selection of kind of pricey candy on the convenience store end. Down by the restrooms, they also had a few half broken video games including a Zoltar-style medicine man fortune-telling machine. No music games though.

The road onto the 40 freeway from there was closed so we had to detour down through the mini town of Encino and the slightly less mini but still small town of Vaughn. We saw a few gas stations in Vaughn but the first open-looking one was Allsup's Phillips 66. At $2.19/gallon of 86 gasoline (weirdly, several places we'd seen had grades other than 87, 89, and 91), the price was a lot better than the last station but still higher than the cities we'd been in recently. We put $20 in the tank and got 2 yummy hot links ($1.09 each) and 2 loaves of bread ($1.59 for 2!!) in the store.

The almost nonexistent community of Yeso, which consisted of a few buildings total, came up next. After that was the town of Ft. Sumner, which was probably the biggest place since Santa Fe but still a little small. It reminded me a bit of Atwater, CA. From Vaughn to there, we'd only passed 2 trucks on the road. Other than that and our lights, it'd been almost pitch black the whole way. Ft. Sumner had a few things though including a Valero, a Family Dollar, and an Allsup's Phillips 66. We stopped at the Allsup's again and got some nuts (3 packets for $1 on special), some $1.39 gallon of coconut water (just like Sonic's Oceanwater), and a 25 cent banana. The inside of this Allsup's actually looked just like the previous one except that this one had a bulletin board with things like advertisements for chickens and livestock. Lol

Another almost nonexistent place that I think was called Taiban came up next. As far as we could tell though, there wasn't anything to see there.

In a little town called Melrose, we tried to stop in an Allsup's Alon gas station but the convenience store part was closed so we just filled the gas tank up with $10.08 and used free air they had there to fill our tires. (Gas was $2.06/gallon of 86.)

A town called Clovis (not the one in Cali near Fresno) came shortly after that. Not sure exactly where the city limit started but the populated area seemed to go on for quite awhile. I could be very wrong but the size of it felt somewhere between that of Merced and Modesto, CA. They had a good amount of open gas stations and motels, though mostly everything else, including McDonald's, was closed. There was an air force base there called Cannon AFB and even a little bowling alley called Mainline Bowl. The bowling alley was closed for the night so we couldn't check for dance games but a sign on the door mentioned their game room so we made a mental note in case we happened to drive back that way. On the way out of Clovis, we stopped at a Love's we found and got me a biiig coffee. Aside from a maximum of 20 minutes so far this trip, I'd done all the driving while Sean did work or chilled in the passenger's seat. Not a problem for me at all cuz it all balanced perfectly imo but I definitely needed a coffee to keep my spirits high and there weren't any other casinos in the area to get freebies from. :p

Just after that, we got to some town called Texico on the Texas state line! There were a few gas stations and little things but, most importantly, it was Sean's first time in Texas!

Adjacent to Texico was another mini town called Farwell with some more scattered buildings, factories, and gas stations but nothing in particular that stood out.

Almost immediately after that was the big Texas state sign!

More small, rural communities follows but I gave up trying to keep up with all the names and just keep an eye out for things that stood out instead.

One town we passed, which I noticed was called Muleshoe, had a decent amount going on including some factories, lots of gas stations, tractor shops, and some chain food joints that were closed for the night like Sonic and McDonald's.

A much smaller, similar town came up shortly after that followed by more little places including one with a McDonald's, subway, Sonic, gas stations. .

At 4am local time (2am Vegas time), we finally reached Lubbock!! Such a weird feeling having Sean there with me and so awesome!

Just after getting into town, we saw a drive-in theater. Not sure if I'd ever seen it before or whether it'd been there when I lived there but it looked pretty cool and we thought it might be worth checking out if we had time.

It was late and we were sleepy so we found a Flying J to park at for the night. There were no noteworthy arcade games inside but they did have some cool, inexpensive post cards! We picked one up for Sean's mom and then went back to the car to spend the night. Luckily, it was cool out but much warmer that it had been in New Mexico. We watched a couple episodes of Bleach, got ready for sleep, and then I traded Sean a bj for a "protein shake" and touched myself. :) After that, we managed to go to sleep in our shorts around 5:30am!

Day 6 - 2/19/15:

I woke up at 12:22pm local time but laid around for another 40 minutes before getting up. When we did get up, the sky was blue and the day was sunny! It was almost warm out but with a light breeze. It felt perfect. I thought I'd remembered Lubbock looking flat and wide open as far as you could see with no visible mountains in the distance. That's exactly how it looked today. Not a place I'd like to live again but such a pretty place to visit.

We went into Flying J and decided to buy a $12 shower for the first time this trip. We'd done a good job keeping and getting clean this trip but it was about time. We hung out for and bit and watched tv in the trucker lounge area while we waited to hear our shower number. There were a few of us waiting for showers at the time but I guess the guy one number ahead of us couldn't wait any longer because after awhile he came up to us and gave us his shower receipt to use. (Being a trucker, his shower was only $5!) We got our $12 refunded and then went to shower together, taking our time and getting super clean. It was nearly 3pm when we finally finished. After some more canned food and bread, it was time to move on.

We needed wifi next to handle some business and get our bearings so we found a Starbucks and chilled out there for a bit, using their internets.

Awhile back, Chik-fil-A had sent us an email saying they were giving out free hot and iced coffee all month and Panda Express had sent us an email saying they were giving out free egg rolls on the 19th. Well, today was the 19th and we also happened to be in a city which, unlike Vegas, had a Chik-fil-A! We decided to take advantage. We looked up the nearest Panda Express and drove over. Coincidentally, Chik-fil-A just happened to be across the street! We went into Panda to get our egg rolls and while eating them an employee came around, wished us a happy Chinese New Year, and gave us each a little red envelope. Inside each envelope was coupons for free sodas and free servings of firecracker chicken breast! We saved the coupons and went to Chik-fil-A to get our free coffees. Sean doesn't drink coffee but we each got one (one iced vanilla, one iced regular) and he gave me his. Yummy!!

My old Lubbock friends got in touch with us then and said they were going to a place called Whitewood Lanes to play some DDR Extreme if we wanted to join in. Of course we did!

Whitewood Lanes
3632 50th St
Lubbock, TX

We drove down and spotted Matt/Evo on the machine when we arrived! Michelle and Eli/Faker showed up shortly thereafter and I introduced Sean to everyone. Then we all took turns playing credits and chatting for a good couple of hours, I believe. So nice to see them all again and catch up!

I'd asked our friends to recommend a restaurant I could take Sean to to give him a real Texas experience, steak and all, and they'd recommended a place called Texas Roadhouse a few minutes away. DDR had made us pretty hungry so after saying goodbyes to the 3 of them we drove over to Roadhouse to get our steak meal! The place was suuuper busy and VERY Texas but we were seated and helped right away with quick and friendly service. They brought us warm, delicious, buttery bread rolls with cinnamon butter to start and we quickly ate them all but were almost immediately given more!  We obviously had to get a steak but also wanted to try an onion blossom they had there. I'd always wanted one but I don't think I'd gotten a chance to get one til now so we ordered that, a medium well 20oz bone-in ribeye steak, and chili and caesar salad for our sides. When it all came out, EVERYTHING was delicious! The onion blossom was tasty but hard to eat much of and the steak was so tender, delicious, and juicy we ate every bit of it and couldn't finish our chili, bread rolls, or onion blossom. Lol We did the salad though and got a box for the rest. We were sooo satisfied and, best of all, we'd only spend $35 including tip for the food and experience!

Down the street from there was the Brunswick bowling alley I used to play ITG at way back in 2006!

Brunswick South Plains Lanes
5150 69th St
Lubbock, TX

Even though Matt had told us they no longer had a dance game there, I had to go have a look and take Sean to see the place.

Not far from there was a place called Main Event.

Main Event
6010 Brownfield Hwy
Lubbock, TX

I don't know if it'd been there or had a dance game when I lived in Lubbock but I don't believe I'd ever been there before. It was currently the only ddrfreak-listed location in Lubbock though, at least until we arrived this trip and updated! :p Anyway, we drove to Main Event to check it out. We were expecting something like Boomers or Scandia but the place was a little more like Round 1 with slightly older games, more of which were in less than ideal condition. It was reeeeally cool though! It was a big place and had 2 rhythm games: Guitar Hero and DDR Supernova. Lots of the games there had credits people had left in them too. DDR was one of them. It was $1/3 songs with joint premium on but someone had left 3 credits in so we played a nonstop, a normal credit, and battle mode! I'd never done battle before but it was pretty fun and funny. The 1P pad, especially the right arrow, was kinda bad and the machine's monitor had been replaced with a tacky little computer monitor but the 2P side was good and it wasn't too hard to get used to the monitor. After playing through the DDR credits, we looked around a bit more and played free credits that had been left in Guitar Hero and 3 odd games we'd never seen before: some golf game, some alien shooting game, and some sea animal shooting game. We tried a credit in each before the arcade finally closed at midnight and we had to walk our mildly sweaty selves back out into the kinda cold, real world. Haha

Everything was so close together there! I took Sean to see Tech Cafe next, where I'd worked as a waitress briefly back in '06. Address: 3602 Slide Rd. Peeking through the window of the closed cafe, everything looked just about exactly the same as I remembered it. It wasn't called Tech Cafe anymore though. It was now called Red Zone.

Down the street from there was the South Plains Mall, where I'd walked from Brunswick and visited way back in '06. Of course, it was closed for the night too but it was cool just having a look from the outside for old times sake.

We went to Walmart after that, right near Roadhouse and not far from the previous few places. Inside looked pretty much just like any big Walmart back home. I guess we had a sweet tooth because, in addition to a Texas shot glass for our collection, all we bought were some candies and cakes!

Between the Walmart parking lot and the nearest open McDonald's, we spent the next couple of hours trying to work out our next move. On the way to McDonald's, we passed a place Matt had mentioned called Mr. Gatti's. He'd said it was a pizza buffet with a PIU NX. We couldn't see the arcade area through the window at the time but were happy to know they at least had a PIU machine in Lubbock these days!

At 3:30am, we were still at a loss as to where to head next so we drove to the nearest Whataburger. Not sure whether it actually was but, as far as I could remember, it looked just like the Whataburger I used to go to with friends back in '06! We weren't hungry but for some reason we ordered a jalapeño cheddar biscuit with bacon and one with sausage for $6something. They were pretty decent but not super spectacular. Since the cashier could tell we clearly weren't from the area, he gave us a few sauces and an order of fries to try. Nothing fancy but it was continuing the trend of accidental freebie-receiving this trip and also cool just to be in Whataburger again!

Feeling very sleepy, we drove back to Flying J then and watched an episode of Bleach before going to sleep at 5am.

Day 7 - 2/20/15

I woke up several times and thought about staying up but we didn't have any particular plans for the day so I figured we may as well catch up on some sleep. It was 1:44pm when we finally got up. We got ready for the day and I called my mom to catch up a bit. We put $15 of gas in and then started the day.

Then we went back to Chik-fil-A so I could get another iced coffee and went driving down University Ave there past Texas Tech just for a little look around.

Another funny note: They had Raising Cane's in Lubbock. They didn't have 99 Cent Store though.

We were in need of energy drinks and a few snacks and supplies so we drove to the nearest Dollar Tree, which wasn't much different from ones back home, and picked up a few bits.

Finally, we game up with a game plan: drive to Oklahoma! We sat in the parking lot using nearby wifi to get in touch with a couple of Oklahoma dance gamers and research things there and on the way. Then, around 7:32pm, we were on the road again!

We passed some little communities including Lorenzo and Ralls on the way out of Lubbock but the first place to really give us a reason to stop was a little town called Crosbyton. There were quite a few things to see there but the most interesting one we noticed was by far a place called Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. Of course, it was closed for the night but looking through the window we saw lots of big bones and models of big animals. Very cool!

We passed through a cute little community called Benjamin around 10pm but didn't see any intriguing businesses or buildings there. Some other little farming communities followed including the decent-sized town of Seymour. They had quite a few things there including a Sonic and an Allsup's. A little later, the freeway took us through a town called Holliday but I think most things there were too far off the freeway for us to see.

A good sized city called Wichita Falls, TX came after that. We saw plenty of potential dance game locations, including a Cinemark move theater, from the freeway but didn't take the time to stop. There were already 2 ddrfreak-listed dance game locations there but neither seemed accessible, assuming they were even still there. One was a Tilt arcade in a mall that would've definitely been closed for the night when we arrived. The other was:

Airman's Club (at Sheppard AFB)
6th Ave & Avenue H
Wichita Falls, TX

I'd tried to visit dance game locations on military bases before and had been turned away for obvious reasons so I assumed we wouldn't be able to go in this one either but we drove up anyway to at least ask if there was still a machine on base, particularly the DDR Extreme (last updated on ddrfreak om 8/3/09) in the Airman's Club. Unfortunately, the guys at the entry booth didn't know. On the bright side, they didn't make fun of us for being nerdy losers and asking either. Haha

At 12:20pm, we reached Oklahoma!

Just after that was the Kiowa Casino, about the size of the casino area at Eastside Cannery in Vegas. I think there was only 1 casino in all of Texas and it was nowhere near where we'd been but Oklahoma had tons! This one gave us each $10 free play for signing up to their players club and we profited $13.34 in free money from it. We also got free drinks from their drink stations. Yay more free coffee for me!

Lubbock had been kinda windy due to the wide-openness but the wind here was so strong it nearly blew me over. It made it really hard to stay in my lane while driving too.

Sean was amused these past couple of days by people saying "ya'll". Lol

Down the road from Kiowa was another casino called Red River. I believe the casino portion was about the same size as Kiowa but Red River had a hotel too. We had a good look around and got some more drinks there including some Big Red soda! First casino so far to have it.

A little after that, we had to pay a $1.50 toll.

A spread out town called Lawton came next but the only thing we saw that stood out was the Comanche Nation Casino. It was linked to the Red River one though, meaning no freeplay, and we still had a ton of drinks so we didn't stop.

A few miles on from there, we pulled off at a small Love's station to get $15 worth of gas. We got a $1 Oklahoma lottery ticket for Sean, a $3 Oklahoma shot glass for our collection, and got some crackers to snack on later.

A short while longer, we encountered a $1.75 toll.

Just after that was a town called Chickasha that, for some reason, reminded me of Turlock, CA.

Two more tolls for $1.50 and $0.55 followed right after that.

Then we arrived in the big town of Norman. We parked at a casino called Riverwind. It was large, especially for the area. We were too tired to go inside at the time though so we put an episode of Bleach on and went to sleep together around 5am.

Day 8 - 2/21/15

We got up at 10:20am. We'd both been having tooth pain off and on for several months but it'd been bugging me a lot the past few days in particular and had finally become unbearably excruciating. My insurance wasn't accepted in Oklahoma so I didn't want to go to the hospital but I finally had to give in and just take the financial hit. It hurt WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much. Words can't begin to describe... Anyway, my sweetheart husband drove me to the Norman Regional hospital and we were seen right away. They prescribed pain killers and antibiotics and we went down the street and paid $23 (no usable insurance) or so to pick them up. Soon after that, I was feeling pretty cloudy but good!

Driving around, we found a place called Star Skate and went in to ask if they had any dance games there. They didn't.

From there, we drove towards what seemed like the middle of nowhere to visit a place called Thunderbird Casino there in Norman. The casino had the wide open, empty feeling of the Lucky Club casino in Vegas. We got some free drinks and signed up for the players club there, earning $15 freeplay for me and $25 for Sean (extra $10 for his birthday). They also had a deal for a free dinner for anyone with a February birthday plus 1 guest. The dinner was to take place the following evening, one day before Sean's 30th bday. Of course, we signed up. Can't say no to a free dinner! They let us choose a time so we chose 7pm. Hopefully we'd be able to get back there by then to take advantage! Either way, our freeplay got us $34.16 in free money so we were already winning!

Down the street from there and back the way we came was the Lake Thunderbird State Park. We stopped to have a look at the lake and take some photos to sell once we got back to Vegas.

Driving back into town, we saw a family fun center just off the highway and exited to get a better look. The place was called The Perfect Swing Family Fun Center. Sad to say, it appeared to be permanently closed down when we arrived.

No far from there was a little casino called Goldsby. About half of the building was taken up by bingo rooms. There wasn't a lot going on but they did have free beverages, including Big Red and some cherry soda, and a few vending machines with a microwave next to them for any foods you might buy and want to warm.

We made our way down the street back to Riverwind again next. Inside, we looked around, got some beverages, and joined the players club. They didn't have free play that was actually free but they did give us each a chocolate bar for signing up and their beverage areas had french vanilla cappuccino and hot tea. So rare!

I was still in a lot of pain because of my tooth so after leaving Riverwind Sean drove me around to a couple of pharmacies to get some pain relief gel and anything else that would help. Then I napped as he drove us towards Tulsa via a town called Shawnee. 

As I was napping off and on, we passed through a couple of small communities but I don't think I missed much. Sean said there hadn't been anything noteworthy to see on the way.

We stopped at Thunder Travel Plaza on the way and got $10 worth of gas and a couple of bags of chips we'd never seen before.

In Shawnee, we visited a busy, good-sized hotel and casino called Grand Casino. They didn't have an arcade or any videos games but they had plenty to make it worth the stop anyway. Not only did they have free beverages but they had $10 match play for new players club members and free vanilla ice cream too! We got some drinks and some ice cream and used the match play to earn ourselves $17.25 in free money! Yay!

Our next stop was another casino in Shawnee, linked with Grand Casino:

Fire Lake Casino
41207 Hardesty Rd
Shawnee, OK

It looked like they had several separate buildings there including the main casino building, a shooting range, a gas station, an arena, and a bowling alley with an arcade. We went into the bowling alley's arcade first and found a DDR X machine! The location hadn't yet been listed on ddrfreak but we soon fixed that! The volume was wayyyyyy too quiet and the pads weren't great (maybe 4/10 for 1P and 6/10 for 2P) but someone had left 14 credits in the machine when we arrived so we played through without complaint! Pretty sure that doubled the amount of DDR X I've played in my lifetime. Lol

After DDR, we moved on to the casino building. Since they were linked with Grand Casino, we were already members of their players club. That didn't stop us from getting some freebies there though! Lol Like Grand Casino, they had vanilla ice cream there but that wasn't all; they also had chocolate ice cream, both flavors swirled, several other lemonade and tea drinks, and even a few coffee creamer flavors!

Some tiny town called McLoud came next. It was very small and quiet and looked a bit old school. There was no one out at the time but it was lit up enough. Slightly eerie.

We got to Kickapoo Casino in Harrah after that. The building looked like a giant, elongated Hershey's kiss from the outside but inside it was a bit like Lucky Club in Vegas but with somewhat better atmosphere. We got more drinks and then joined the players club. After each playing $5 in their slot machines, they gave us each another $20 in freeplay. Sean had already won big with his $5 so we walked out of there with a profit of more than $105! Free money ftw!

It was a bit of a drive to the next place we wanted to check out, Creek Nation Casino in Bristow, and we had to pay a $4 toll to make the journey but they refunded $1.50 of that when we exited at Bristow. They would charge us again when we left Bristow and headed on towards Tulsa. The town there was another cute, little one but not much was open when we arrived. The casino was open but we were both tired so we just parked up in their lot and went to sleep for the night, probably sometime after 2am.

It was sooooo cold in the night. It even snowed! At one point, Sean had to go to the trunk to get the warmest clothes we'd brought with us. It still wasn't quite enough but it helped.

Day 9 - 2/22/15:

We woke up quite a few times but we're too cold and a little to tired to start the day til 2pm. When we finally did wake up, we had to run the car heater a bit before we could make a move.

We finally went into the casino around 3pm. It was a little place with 1 drink station but they offered $10 freeplay for new players club members and the drink station had cherry limemade, strawberry Crush, and the normal things too. We got some drinks, signed up for the players club, and used the $10 each freeplay to get a total profit of $14 in free money!

With my tooth feeling much better today, I took over driving again.

On the way through Bristow back to the freeway towards Tulsa, we needed gas so we stopped at a cheap station called Kum & Go (lol) and filled up with $30. (It was $2.01/gallon of 87 and they only had that and 91.) We were feeling almost as empty as the car had been so we went inside for food. Not all the food was cheap but they did have a few burgers and sub sandwiches for only $1.29 each and bags of Hiland brand chips in various flavors at 2/$1.50. We each got a sub sandwich and a bag of chips- some zesty, tangy flavor called cayenne for me and salt and vinegar for Sean.

Now that the sun was up, Bristow looked even cuter yet more old school than we'd noticed the night before.

We had to pay another $1.25 toll as we left town.

As we approached Tulsa, we started seeing Waffle House and QuikTrip locations!

We stopped at Woodward Park for a quick look. It was a place I couldn't remember more than the name of but had been to way back when I was 9. There wasn't much to look at there but bare trees and snow all over the ground but it was kinda pretty.

Then we went to see something famous that I don't recall ever seeing before: a 76-foot-tall, 43,500 pound statue of an oil worker called The Golden Driller! It's the 5th tallest statue in the United States. Cool!

From there, we went to see the Great American Flea Market, I think it's called. It was closed for the day and the outdoor area wouldn't have been open anyway with the snow like it was but I still wanted to see it and show Sean. I believe it was the flea market my parents had taken me to when I lived in the area when I was 9 but going back it really didn't look familiar to me at all, at least not from the outside. Oh well, still cool to see!

Driving around Tulsa, we spotted a place called Skateland Family Fun Center. We stopped in to ask if they had any dance/music games but they didn't.

We were hungry again and all the cold outside had us continuously wanting hot food so we went to the nearest Panda Express and used the coupons we'd received a few days prior for free servings of firecracker chicken breast. It was pretty tasty and enough to tide us over til we found something in particular we wanted to eat later.

We had to be careful every time we got out of the car. The ground was soooo icy and slippery it was hard to keep our balance!

A little off topic but there really were a lot of Sonic restaurants in Oklahoma! They had quite a few Whataburger locations too.

I got a bit hungry again while driving around so I used some jelly and butter packets I'd picked up during the trip and bread we'd bought at Allsup's and made yummy sandwiches!

We were on the way to my dad's old work at an air conditioning company called Aaon where he did welding when we saw a place called River West Festival Park. The park seemed to be under construction but it had a pretty nice view of the city lights.

A couple of minutes from there, we got to Aaon! It was the first thing that had looked familiar to me since we arrived! I found the spot where my family used to park our van and wait for my dad til he'd come out for lunch or for us to pick him up. It'd been sooooo long but the place looked just like I'd remembered it!

While headed to Aaon, we saw a sign for Chandler Park. I hadn't been able to remember the name of the park til I saw it on that sign but I'd been telling Sean about the place for a good few years now. It was a place my family had taken me a few times, where we caught some of my childhood pets, where my dad took me climbing up some rocks and I saw a snake in a cave and ran out screaming.. :D We tried to go in the park for a look but it was closed, probably due to the weather but we weren't sure. Oh well. At least it was still there!

After that, we did A LOT of driving around, trying to find a motel I used to live in in the area. It was a little hard because I didn't know the name of the motel. All I knew was the layout, what it looked like more or less, that there was a little creek running in front of it, that it was near a freeway, that there was a QuikTrip nearby, and that Dollar General and/or Family Dollar weren't too far from it either. We figured out the vicinity it was in relatively easily and then started driving by all the motels we could find. When I finally saw it though I knew it was the one! It was America's Value Inn. I'm not sure if it had the same name as when I lived there 17.5 years or so prior but it was the same place. I couldn't believe it! I parked and hopped out, showing Sean all the spots there I'd told him stories about. The only big thing I couldn't seem to find there was the little basketball court I remembered being somewhere around the back, not part of the hotel but near it. Guess it'd been taken out? Not sure. It didn't matter though. We'd actually found the place!

Next, we found the QuikTrip down the street that my family used to take me to. It was undergoing some construction, particularly in the restaurant area, but otherwise I think it looked pretty much the same. They had soooooo many drinks! We tried just about ALL OF THEM. We'd tried a bunch at other QuikTrips before but if we'd missed any then I'm pretty sure we got them now! We also got some $1 chocolate milks (same brand as I used to get with my family, I believe!), lots of cheap candies (they had great deals on individual,  little candies!), taquitos (I was having a hungry day and they were pretty cheap), and huuuge drink refills super cheap! Sean got Rooster Booster energy drink and I got an almond amaretto coffee drink of some sort. Maybe cappuccino? Mmmmm...

As we were sitting in the car, it officially became Sean's 30th birthday local time!!!! Happy birthday, sexy husband! Love you!!!...So,..we continued exploring in celebration! :D

Next, we tried to go to my dad's old school, Spartan School of Aeronautics. There was a fence around the airport it was at but we could at least see where it was! We got a pic of a sign there and took a map as a souvenir!

Near there was some mountain thing called Turkey Mountain. It was too cold to get out and explore but we drove in and had a decent look at the city lights from a distance. The view wasn't picture worthy or capturable anyway but it was nice to look at.

Not far from there was a casino called River Spirit Casino. It was a bigger casino. We went in, got free drinks, and signed up for their players club. I got $5 freeplay for joining and Sean got $5 for joining and an extra $10 for his birthday! After playing through it, we walked out with $32.05 in free money!

Driving from there to downtown Tulsa, we saw the Zink dam on the Arkansas River. Nice view out over the water but impossible to take a pic of.

Everything in downtown was dead when we arrived at 3am but it was a nice-looking place with quite a few tall buildings. We drove around and looked around for awhile, taking some pics and vids while trying to stay warm in the car.

We'd heard about another casino called Osage Casino north of downtown so we drove up, got free drinks, joined their players club, and walked away with $12.60 in free money! The players club had been closed but security saw us wandering around, asked if we needed help, and got someone to sign us up. Yay!

It was nearly 5am then. We were somewhat hungry again then and wanted an excuse to hangout somewhere so we drove to a Waffle House for a delicious, inexpensive, country, dine-in experience. As seems to be the case with most Waffle House locations I've been to, our waitress had a pretty noticeable accent. Lots of "ya'll"s. :D Since we were both really hungry, I ordered a waffle with blueberries for $3.35 and a cheeseburger for $1 and Sean ordered a double cheeseburger for $2 and hashbrowns with mushrooms and country gravy for $2.90. (Had to get some hashbrowns in honor of the song The Bad Touch by the Bloodhound Gang, which we listened to in the car a little later!) Such a good deal for a nice meal. After tip, we spent just over $12.

Feeling like we'd successfully conquered Tulsa the best we could given the amount of time we had, we drove to Glenpool to check out Glenpool Elementary, where I used to go to school when I lived there, and my old classmate Ashley's house, where I lived with my family briefly, right across the street from a video store.

Day 10 - 2/23/15 (Sean's 30th Bday!):

Though we hadn't slept yet, the sun came up as we were driving around! We didn't have any trouble finding the school but the video store seemed to be long gone (no google or gps results that fit) so we couldn't use its location to find the house and we didn't have the address.  Nevertheless, we drove through pretty much all of the neighborhoods nearby and I got to show Sean more or less what it'd been like there. Even better, we found a storm shelter on a piece of property that was for sale and got a look in! It was our first time looking in a storm shelter, I believe. So weird but cool!!

We started back towards home via Oklahoma City then. Unfortunately, right near the start of our journey home we took a wrong exit and had to pay for it with 2 non-refundable $0.75 tolls (1 each way). Lame. Awhile after that, we had to pay $4 for another toll.

It started snowing HARD then. Everything was white! Geez, were we underprepared! We didn't even bring our snow chains!

When we finally got to Oklahoma City, the first thing we did was go to Love's to fill up our empty gas tank ($29.45). While there, we grabbed a postcard for Sean's mom and got ourselves an $11 shower. It was freezing out but we needed it. Besides, what better excuse to have birthday shower sex?! ;D

Leaving there, we headed to the first 18 and up casino I think I've ever seen in the United States: Remington Park Racing Casino. It was the second casino I'd seen to have a horse racing track now. No freeplay or match play for new members but they had free drinks and free wifi! We spent a little time catching up with wifi things while Sean sipped beverages I was too full to touch and then we headed out into the even heavier snow. x.x

It was finally time to start the homeward bound portion of the trip. This was the general idea, obviously not accounting for our many detours!

Trying to drive around, it was to the point where it wasn't safe to take the freeway or most of the main roads. There were so many accidents, cars stuck in intersections, traffic jams. We went to get some wifi to check the weather forecast and come up with a plan of action. The snow didn't appear to be going anywhere fast in our area but was clear just south of us so our choices were buy chains or "wing it", as Sean would say. He insisted on the latter so, being much less familiar with snow driving than him, I let him drive us to safety utilizing the safest possible roads.

While very slowly making our way out of the area the safest way possible, we saw another Mustang, 1 year newer than ours, stuck at a traffic light up a shallow hill. We went to help him out and had a laugh with him about how shitty sports cars are in the snow. It was funny watching us all wriggling around helplessly. Just after that, we saw the exact same thing happen to a Camaro in the exact same spot. XD

We eventually needed a pee break so we stopped at a kinda weird but totally awesome 7 Eleven. Inside, prices on most things were average but we found AWESOME deals on a lot of things scattered throughout the store as well as a few random, unique things. Fountain drinks were cheap, canned sodas were pretty cheap, there was an entire fridge section (minus 1 row) with $0.99 microwaveable food items, other stuff was cheap, they had a ton of cappuccino flavors as well as a ton more flavor shots to add, they had some weird sauce called Rustup (The Lazy Man's Sauce) that tasted pretty good, and they had a weird movie rental service thing!

Not long later, we found the new cheapest gas prices we'd seen anywhere BY FAR: $1.89/gallon in a small, older looking town called Yukon, kind of like Bristow but perhaps bigger. We weren't sure if it was just for the snowy day or if gas was always way cheaper there.

On the freeway a little later, we saw another accident: a semi-truck that had apparently lost control and hit the central barrier head on with its tail swinging around towards it.

Just down the road from there was a Shell station and some Cherokee Indian trading posts. The inside of Shell looked really cool and different but unfortunately the trading posts were closed for the day. :( Still a cool sight though!

Being out of the busy city, I took over driving again then. I drove us til the snow started thinning and then took the next exit I saw and parked to finally get us a little sleep. We cuddled up in the passengers seat with blankets and napped for a couple of hours. That's all I needed to be able to drive safely again. We went into the Phillips 66 gas station at the exit for a quick pee and then got back on the freeway at 9pm.

It wasn't long before we got to the little town of Clinton (population 9,000). We exited there to stop in the medium-sized Lucky Star Casino. They had a strict no cameras rule so we were only able to get pics of the outside and our cashout voucher after gambling but they had a few drink stations, several rooms to gamble in, a bar, a snack bar, and more. They gave us each $10 freeplay for signing up to their players club and, after gambling it, we came out with $15.75 in free money as well as a couple of free drinks. I got a coffee and it was one of the weirdest coffees I've tried. It was really good though. The brand was Douwe Egberts or something. As for the looks of the casino, it was sort of like a smaller warehouse room with painted walls, cool decor, a pretty good atmosphere, and smaller rooms continuing on back to back to the left (if looking at the front of the casino).

Just down the road from there, driving through Clinton to get back to the freeway, we saw a tank.

Clinton was an interesting-looking place with lots of less-than-modern buildings and even a Bar S factory! On the way out, we saw an indoor water park. Elk City (population 12,000) was 22 miles or so from there. There was another Bar S factory and plenty of chain businesses off the freeway there but nowhere we felt like stopping.

With the roads still icy, we were having to drive super slow. It was a bit tedious but at least we were getting there and in one piece!

Around 11:40pm, we spotted a TA Travel Center in Sayre and pulled off for a look. No music games there but they had 4 other video games including Crazy Taxi, which Sean had a credit on. We put $10 worth of gas in the car and asked to use the microwave there. Then we heated up our remaining 4 foods, including a pack of 2 chili dogs, from the 7 Eleven earlier and had a mini feast! (We'd already had the energy drink, one rib sandwich, and the Italian sub when we bought them. Lol)

We got back into Texas at 12:50am but we weren't in the clear yet. There was still some snow and ice and caution signs warning about icy roads.

We drove through Shamrock (population around 1,900?) about 15 or 20 minutes later. Not too much to see but they had a few bits like McDonald's, Chevron, Valero.

We entered McClean (1.2 square miles, population 830) at 1:39am. Aside from maybe a house or two a short distance from the freeway, we didn't actually see any buildings or anything there, though they apparently have some barbed wire museum there..

Just before 2am, we got the Gray County Safety Rest Area. It was an awesome-looking rest area with a heated and very warm indoor lobby, restrooms that doubled as tornado shelters, vending machines, lots of plaques of information and fun facts, and even a fun and hilarious driving safety video game!

We got to a very town called Groom (0.8 square miles, population 587) at 2:40am. There was a Phillips 66 there and an airport in the area (we saw lots of red flashing lights) but there wasn't much else to see except for the largest cross in the United States, which we spotted from the freeway.

We approached Amarillo, TX around 3:40am. We exited for the Amarillo TA Travel Center but just off the exit we saw one of the most noteworthy spots of the trip: The Big Texan Steak Ranch aka the place with the 72oz steak dinner challenge! The place looked TOTALLY AWESOME and not only had a restaurant but also had a hotel, a horse hotel, maybe more?! We also read that the hotel their had a pool shaped like the state of Texas!

We thought about checking out The Big Texan's restaurant but it was closed for the night anyway so, in the meantime, we went to TA. It was a big TA with a good sized game room. No music games but they did have some cool souvenirs and decent prices on Haribo gummies! We'd been wanting to get a dreamcatcher on our trip for Sean's mom but hadn't found one. Luckily, TA had some and for pretty good prices too! We got some Haribo sour gummy bears for $1.39 and a dreamcatcher for $5 and then went to the car to eat some canned food and Waffle House leftovers, watch bleach, and finally get some real rest at 5:30am.

Day 11 - 2/24/15:

We hadn't slept much recently so we didn't wake up til about 1pm. We spent an hour getting washed up and changed and organizing the car but by 2pm we were finally ready to go.

We drove back to The Big Texan for a look inside and maybe a meal, some gifts, some of their Big Texan handcrafted beers.. It was pretty big inside the main building and was probably the most interesting place we'd seen this trip, with lots of unique decor, locally made things, things we'd never seen or tried before. The prices on most things weren't bad either! There was a big gift shop with lots of unique and really cool things as well as the standard gift shop things too, a live rattlesnake in a tank (so cute!), a bar with your typical bar drinks as well as their own beers and ales, a western-style 2-story restaurant, a candy shop with homemade fudge and free samples, slot machines, a few gimmicky video game-type game things (Zoltar, a shooting range thing, other stuff), free wifi, a bunch of pet cats roaming outdoors in the backyard area, a huge wooden chair, and much more! We got some inexpensive goodies in the gift shop including a couple types of hot sauce sample bottles for $1.25 each, an arrowhead for $1.25, and a bunch of little pins for only $0.15 each, some stuff for us and some for family and friends. From the candy shop, we tried the amaretto fudge. It tasted like cherry chocolates but was super soft! There were some free Big Texan tokens in some of the slot machines so we took a few as souvenirs and to make souvenir necklaces to sell from home later. Then we dined in the restaurant, not hungry enough to take on the 72oz steak dinner challenge but hungry nonetheless and ready to try some food there. We got the 4 ale sampler for $6 and chose the rattlesnake IPA, vanilla porter, raspberry wheat, and the Palo Duro pale ale. I'm not a big drinker but we both agreed that the raspberry wheat was the best. For food, we got a $9 lunch special and chose the Frito pie and Texas rice. It was really good! Better yet, our bill was only $16.24 plus tip. While we ate, some older guy attempted the 72oz steak dinner challenge but, sadly, gave up after half an hour. :( After food, we played the shooting range game thing together, did a photo shoot to sell pics from, and then got back on the now snow-free road!

We drove through Amarillo but didn't stop to see the city itself. We figured the most interesting things about the area were things like The Big Texan and Cadillac Ranch so we used our time accordingly, stopping to see the Cadillac Ranch gift shop, which was closed for the day but looked cool from the outside, and then to see the Cadillacs themselves down the road! We took LOTS of pics and a vid there, wrote and drew some things on the cars using spray paint cans people left behind (spray painting the cars is encouraged!), and did a shoot to sell pics from later too!

Then we drove down the street to a Love's for a restroom break and to get Sean a hot tea. :D

Not far down the road, we saw lots of factories, a cattle farm with a "Quality Beef" sign and the most cows we'd ever seen in one place, and a bunch of wind turbines. The landscape was wide open with nothing but fields as far as the eye could see.

We entered a little town called Vega (1.1 square miles, population 1,000) shortly after that. There were a couple of gas stations and maybe a motel or two but not much worth mentioning otherwise.

A little further on, we got to Adrian, TX (population 150). Sean had bought an iPhone offline map app with Wikipedia city guides during our trip so we'd been using it to learn about a few of the places we were driving through. It told us that Adrian was the location of Route 66's halfway point and that Pixar had visited Adrian and modeled the cafe owner in their movie Cars after the owner of the cafe in Adrian. (The car Tex Dinoco from Cars was modeled after the horned cars at The Big Texan.) In the movie Cars, inspired by real events, it talks about how the fictional town of Radiator Springs kind of died after a new I40 freeway was built, bypassing Historic Route 66 and the town. Like Radiator Springs in the movie, Adrian was one of many real towns to be bypassed when the I40 was built to streamline travel, making many sections of Route 66 obsolete.

At the freeway exit, we pulled off to have a look at Adrian and the cafe and Route 66 midpoint sign there. It was a tiny place and, despite it being just after 7pm, the few businesses that were there were all either closed for the night or closed down for good. There was some kind of factory that may or may not have still been in use as well as several abandoned buildings, a small and long-since-closed Phillips 66 gas station, a motel that seemed to be in business but had absolutely no lights on, an auto repair place that I believe was closed down, a deli that I couldn't tell one way or the other about, and maybe a few other places but that was about it. Very interesting, very small place!

At 7:45pm, we got back into New Mexico.

At 8:20pm, we arrived in Tucumcari, NM (population 5,300). It was the largest town between Amarillo, TX and Albuquerque, NM on the I40 but didn't seem to have much going on there, lookswise or according to their Wiki article. We did stop at a Love's there to get $10 in gas though. (It was $2.19/gallon of 86 at the time.)

Just after that, we entered some place called Palomas. We couldn't see a single building or anything at all there though. It was more or less the same deal in another place we passed called Cuervo but at least we saw porch lights from a few houses there.

Santa Rosa, NM (population 2,700) came next. According to Wikipedia, the only thing out of the ordinary there seemed to be a group of natural lakes, small in width, connected by a network of underwater tunnels. The deepest of the lakes, often used for scuba diving, is called Blue Hole. As for what we actually saw there, it was mostly just some hotels, lots of houses, a Dollar General, a Family Dollar, and travel centers including a TA.

We stopped at TA and put another $5 in gas in just in case we needed a bit more to get to Albuquerque where prices were super cheap. This TA had a somewhat odd layout inside with a music gameless arcade in the front and center. We got some hot water to make Sean another tea there and found and bought something called a Heater Meal. Upon closer inspection, we saw that it was a self-heating meal that prepared itself in 12 minutes! There were 3 different types available there for $5 each. Having only seen self heating soups and maybe drinks but never full meals before, we had to get one and see what it was all about! We chose the green pepper steak with rice meal. As it cooked, it expended, vibrated a bit, made bubbling noises, smelled a bit chemically, and got super hot and steamy, causing a bit of a mini scene and attracting some attention and curiosity. After 12 minutes of letting it cook, we opened it up. Once out of the heating bag, the food smelled pretty good. We tried it and were not disappointed! It was at least as good as a decent quality microwave dinner and definitely more fun. It'd be awesome for things like camping!

Past Santa Rosa, we saw a sign for Carlsbad Caverns a few hours south of us, down below Roswell, NM. We didn't have time to go this trip but kept it in mind for future trips.

About 60 miles from Albuquerque, we passed the Clines Corner Phillips 66.

A little further on was Moriarty (population 2,000). Despite the small population, there was actually a decent amount of stuff there. Reading up before going, we saw that it was the best place to go to buy fireworks in the Albuquerque metropolitan area. Approaching it, we saw lots of billboards including several for firework shops. There were a lot of hotels, travel centers, fast food joints, and other businesses and local shops there. We pulled off to check out the TA Travel Center there and saw a cool-looking firework store just off the exit. The layout of this TA was completely different from the last one but equally strange. Even their arcade was strange. There weren't any dance games or much of any games at all but there were a few dining tables and chairs.

Just after that was a town called Edgewood. There was a McDonald's, a Ford dealership, a Verizon store, a few other things. It was small but we read that it's currently the fastest growing city in New Mexico. It also has a wildlife park/zoo which is the only zoo in the world entirely constructed by youth participants.

Shortly after that, at 11:45pm local time, we were back in Albuquerque. The fuel light came on almost immediately after getting to town. Great timing! We went to Circle K to fill up. Guess the gas prices had been going up a bit over the past few days because the it was $2.11/gallon for 86 there and not much different at other stations. I hadn't thought about it til now but it made sense. Inside, we found Lay's Bacon Mac and Cheese (new flavor!) chips for $1.49. We gave the cashier $30 for the chips, which ended up being really good, and gas.

Around 12:40am, we were at the Route 66 casino again. This time their players club was open so we joined and got $3 each in freeplay. We only won $2.50 but it was free money just for stopping in and getting free drinks. Better yet, the coffee there was Douwe Egberts. Yum! We also took a few more pics for fun and did a few photo shoots in the less busy, non-gaming parts of the casino and would sell those pics for even more money back in Vegas!

The little communities of Mesita and Laguna were shortly after that but we didn't really see anything other than maybe porch lights of houses there. After that was the Dancing Eagle casino again and a sign for another place called Paraje (population 669) a couple of miles from the freeway where apparently 91 percent of residents were Native American and only 4.3 percent were white people. I guess that makes sense, being on Indian grounds.

It seemed like it'd just snowed pretty much everywhere we'd been this trip because everywhere since leaving Oklahoma had at least some snow on the ground when we passed through. Just after Paraje, we saw and pulled up to Sky City Casino for for the second time this trip and almost couldn't handle the cold on the way in. The winds were icy and chilled us to the bone! At least the roads were dry though. Inside Sky City, the snack bar and restaurant were closed for the night and we didn't see any hot food for sale. We were hungry though so, in addition to our usual couple of drinks, we got some hot water to take to the car and use to make some noodle cups! We ate our noodle cups with bread and were pretty satisfied after. We couldn't actually drink any more of our free drinks but we'd been saving a few in bottles we'd emptied during the trip so we'd still have tasty drinks while driving thru casino-less areas and maybe even once we arrived at home.

Rather than getting on the freeway immediately after leaving the casino, we decided to take a road from it called the Indian Service Route 30 which loops out through some nearby villages and back to the I40 again. The first village was called the North Acomita Village (population 300) and was made up of scattered trailer parks. The roads there weren't paved-just dirt, completely covered with snow in some stretches. After that were Acomita and Alaska. It was really dark and hard to see but there weren't any businesses there. Just occasional, normal-looking homes and a few cool-looking abandoned buildings. Up a bit was a turnoff which had much more lit up public buildings, a school, offices, a few other bits. There were normal cars at all the businesses and homes but everything in the area was silent. There were no people out, no movement. A couple of cars passed us on the road but nothing was open, there were no stores (as far as we could see), no one seemed to be awake. More scattered homes followed, many with a single light on the side. Then the road led us back to the freeway and we continued towards home.

We were back in Grants, NM right after that.

At 4:52am, we saw lots of houses off the freeway but no businesses and we couldn't see a town name anywhere.

Thoreau (population 1,800) was after that but same deal-nothing but houses visible from the freeway.

Then came an exit with a big refinery and a Pilot Travel Center followed by some community a bit off the freeway to the right.

Right after that was the Navajo Fire Rock Casino just outside of Gallup. There wasn't an exit from the I40 for the casino so we had to exit about 6 miles early and take Historic Route 66, running right next to the I40, to get there. When we arrived, the casino was closed. Apparently they weren't a 24 hour casino and it was around 5:40am local time. We didn't want to skip the casino a second time though and, after about 15 or 16 hours of traveling, we were tired anyway. We drove under the I40 through a short tunnel to see if there was anywhere to park and sleep. All we saw, however, were trailer homes ranging from shabby to decent. We didn't continue very far down the road so not sure what was beyond those but after getting back onto Historic Route 66 we entered Gallup, found a couple of motels, and parked up at the nearest one. We watched an episode of Bleach and then went to sleep together in the passengers seat just after 6am.

Day 12 - 2/25/15:

We made ourselves get up 6 hours later to get the day going. We'd both been dreaming about sex though so I had to hop on Sean's joystick to handle some business before we could do anything else. Lol After that, we got washed up and dressed and drove back down the short road to Fire Rock.

We hadn't been in the Gallup area when the sun was up before. Seeing it now, the landscape was gorgeous! We parked at Fire Rock, took lots of pics outside and went in to see what the place was about. It was a small to medium casino with a main room and a few other rooms and it looked a bit like if a circus tent was a building, like the inside of the Kickapoo Casino we'd seen in Oklahoma. It had one drink station, a cafe, a restaurant, a gift shop. Best of all though, they gave us each $20 in freeplay for signing up to their players club and from it we gained $43 in free money! We also got a couple of beverages, of course, and had a good look around the casino and a peek in the pricey gift shop.

Then we ate some canned tamales and bread in the car. We kinda wanted restaurant food but didn't want to take the time for it and didn't see any fast food we wanted more than our tamales.

Since we were in Gallup during the day this time, we stopped back in the Rio West Mall to check and see if DDR was still in the Tilt arcade there..

Tilt (at the Rio West Mall)
1300 West I-40 Frontage Road
Gallup, NM

It was! Just like it's 8/11/04 ddrfreak update had claimed, it was still Extreme (though it had a Max2 marquee and a just a small banner over part of it saying, "NOW!! 8th Mix Extreme), still $1/3 songs. The screen was replaced with one about 2/3 the height but around the same width as the original but we were still able to play on it normally. When we first put our credits in to play and started a song, the pads didn't register AT ALL but after an employee restarted the machine they were working fine again. The 1P pad was a bit mediocre as far as public machines go but the 2P pad was really good. It wasn't completely perfect but we got through most songs with somewhere between a full combo and 2 misses on it. For some reason, many of the songs had no preview music. We weren't sure if they might play fine anyway but didn't check. After DDR, we shared a quick credit on a very broken Final Furlong that had 2/3 quarters in and then got on with our trip home.

Not long at all after that was the Arizona/New Mexico state line. There was a Navajo reservation and a rest area (the  Painted Cliffs Rest Area) there with a long line of Navajo gift and souvenir shops owned by a Navajo family. We knew we should hurry home but we couldn't help stopping to shop and look around! The place looked SO cool. It was against some small, red rock mountains, one of which even had an old cave in it. One of the buildings, which ended being the fanciest and most commercial inside but still had lots of handmade and native stuff, was shaped like a giant teepee! Another store there, at the very end of the line of shops, had an old, wooden outhouse out front that still appeared to work and be used as week as well other mysterious, wooden buildings and a micro trail to a closer look at the old cave in the mountain. The shop itself was built over the state line, part in AZ and part in NM. We donated $5 to to the owner for letting us look around. Between the shops, we bought a $6 falsa blanket as a gift, 6 arrow heads for $1 each to turn into necklaces to sell and gift, some green chili jelly on sale for $2.49, a $2.39 buffalo jalapeño smoked jerky stick, a hot pickle (not pictured) for $1.09, 2 glass pebbles with pewter figurines on them for $1 each, and some hookah charcoal just because it was the cheapest we'd seen ever!  It our first time trying buffalo but it was pretty good, a bit crumbly, slightly different from normal jerky, and the tiniest bit hot because of the jalapeño. The pickle wasn't very hot but tasted a bit of foot odor. Lol The jelly was awesome though! It wasn't too different from normal jelly flavors except that it was the slightest bit spicy and tasted slightly of chili. We were pretty hungry at the time so after looking around all the shops and a convenience store there, where we got the pickle, we drove just down the road a minute to the rest area for a restroom break, to make jelly sandwiches with our new jelly, and to try all our foods!

Some misc communities popped up again down the freeway but everything was a short distance away except for a Days Inn and a Mobil, right up against the freeway, which were the only businesses we saw. At 7:11 there was an exit fir Navajo. Whatever was there must've been a little further out because the only thing by the freeway was a Shell station. 12 minutes later was the exit for ths Perrified Forest National Park. Sadly, not enough time to stop this trip and it was already totally dark out.

At 7:38, we saw a travel center with a Conoco gas station called Hopi Travel Plaza. We exited to have a look. At $2.42/gallon of 87, the gas wasn't cheap. They had some cats roaming around out front so we played with the most friendly one for a minute before going in. The inside was the most spread out we'd ever seen a travel plaza. It was like a mini shopping plaza. There was a Burger King, a Hopi Indian gift shop, a knife shop, showers, a restaurant, a convenience store, a salon, and more! Lots of neat things to see there, both typical travel center stuff and Native American stuff, but all we found that we wanted to buy at the time was a Hostess chocolate and Bavarian creme danish, which was pretty yummy but not quite as spectacular as the name might lead you to expect. :p Before leaving, we used free wifi there to handle a few quick and time sensitive, work-related things. Then we were in the freeway once again.

Not sure exactly what point it happened at but somewhere from around here to home we stopped seeing any traces of snow.

Holbrook came up again after that followed by some big factory and then a Love's where gas was $2.25/gallon of 87. We filled the tank up there for $28.70.

Winslow followed the occasional residences dotted in the distance around the freeway and several minutes later we passed the turnoff for the meteor crater we'd been too late to see earlier in the trip. Sadly, we were much later this time and still couldn't see it. Maybe another time.

We pulled over for a sec just to check something about the area we were in. Then we had a thought: the freeway wasn't too busy so we thought why not test out our 0-60? It wasn't great because we haven't done the best job of caring for our car, which was now nearing 160k miles, and because we drive an automatic and the gear changing is atrocious but we eventually reached 60 in about 8.5-9 seconds. :p

Several minutes onward, we were at the Twin Arrows Navajo Casino Resort again, getting numerous free drinks. It was the last casino before Nevada so we had to take advantage and fuel ourselves!

A few minutes before 11pm, we reached Winona-a small community, part of Flagstaff, where the Winona meteorite landed. We exited there, drove down a shabby road called Angell Rd, and looked for where the Wiki article seemed to be saying it'd hit. It was super dark but we used our phone lights and light from a passing train to see yet all we saw was a small canyon. There weren't any signs or anything too out of the ordinary so we weren't sure whether we were in the right spot. Getting back on the freeway, there was a Shell station with a kinda old school, red, neon sign on our right. The convenience store was closed for the night but pumps were still on.

We were hungry then so we got 6 items at Del Taco off an exit in Flagstaff for only $5.58 and even had a little left over after!

A small quantity of businesses and factories came up after Flagstaff followed by Williams again (population 3,000). Reading the Wiki for it though, nothing much stood out about Williams.

Getting back to Ash Fork (population 457?) another 15 or so minutes on, we read the Wiki article for it and learned some interesting facts about the little community and area: Apparently, part of the movie Universal Soldier was filmed there when the filmmakers bought cheap buildings there just to blow up in the movie. The Cathedral Caves as well as Dante's Descent sinkhole, which is known as Devil's Hole, are located there/near there. The article also mentions that inspiration for the setting of the movie Cars did come from there and surrounding areas.

We saw signs for Seligman (population 456) next but didn't think anything of it til we neared it and the exit signs for it indicated food options in the area. Turns out the famous Snow Cap Drive-In cafe as well as a restaurant my mom had mentioned to me years ago called Roadkill Cafe were both there!  I immediately exited to see. From the I40 exit for the town, a sign told us it was 2 miles to Seligman. The heart of town was actually located on Historic Route 66 and had lost a lot of business, like many other little towns, when the I40 was built to bypass it. When we got there, nearly every business looked incredibly intriguing and completely unique! It was almost exclusively local businesses on each side of the road with residences in neighborhoods behind the businesses. I think the only chain businesses there were a Chevron, a76, USPS, and a U-Haul and the only open places when we arrived seemed to be the motels and the pumps at Chevron and 76. A few places looked closed down permanently. Like other towns we'd read about, Wiki mentioned Seligman as a town that Radiator Springs was loosely based off of. Throughout the town, there were actually lots of old cars, many done up to look like characters from Cars! We had a close-up look at the fronts of most of the businesses down the road and all around the two cafes we went there to see. Everything was so dark that we couldn't get pics of everything but we captured most of it and and knew we'd be back again not only to get better pics and vids but to stop in the cafes and other places there and see what it was all about! We were so excited about it, in fact, that we thought about doing a roadtrip down all of Route 66-end to end-one of these days, stopping to see all the other unique towns and other sights along the way!

Coming out the other side of Seligman, it was easy to get back onto the I40. We got back to it and didn't stop again til we got to Kingman and exited for a restroom break at Love's. From there, it was only 1hr 40mins left til home!

Either working, playing phone games, reading Wiki articles to me, or looking at maps for me, Sean had been keeping me company the whole trip home while I drove. He was pretty sleepy now though and I really wanted him awake to celebrate a successful trip with a bath, hot food, and a movie once we got home so I had him take a nap til we got back.

At the I40 exit towards Vegas, I stopped at the TA we always visit to put just enough gas in the tank to safely get us home. I dropped a random amount of $5.38 in and we were set. At a price of $2.34 for 87, TA was currently just barely the cheapest gas I saw in the area.

It was 3:35am Pacific time when we finally got back to Pacific time and the Nevada and the  state line. <3

At 4:03am, we pulled into our driveway. Whew! I was so relieved to be home again!! After such an epic journey, the only thing left to do was to wash it all off with a hot bath, have a home cooked meal, crawl into bed with a sexy husband, make love for the first time in a couple of weeks, and watch Cars and Twister!!!

....and maybe help him open the bday gifts from our friends and family that had been waiting there at home for him!! A big thanks from both of us!