We left Kingman Arizona at 8:10 a.m. (Mileage 35320) and headed out onto Interstate 40 for Santa Fe New Mexico. Deb has been looking forward to this for most of the trip. The problem is that there is a very cold jet stream that has blanketed the western and southwestern U.S. in a blanket of extreme cold.

I40 was in terrible shape, no road closures mind you, but because of the wide open spaces, and let me tell you wide open is no understatement - the winds race across the highway and any wetness turns immediately into ice. The road itself was also in horrible shape. I'm going to send an email to both Bill Ric******* and John McCain to put some people to work in their states to get these highways fixed. They have a speed limit of 75 miles per hour in both states and people travel easily at 85. My underspec'd UHaul is lucky if I can get it to 65 - so you can imagine these good old boys in their pickups blowing by at 85 mph - a couple of times I was going to get out of the truck because I thought I had pulled it over to the shoulder.

We've seen lots of those yellow animal warning signs - we've seen cow, steer, deer, elk, bull - what's next - the only thing we have seen is a few birds and one road kill. We're very surprised with the amount of snow here. Knowing how life is for us in Abbotsford, we don't get snow and rarely wear any jackets - we come 1,800 miles south and it's colder than a hell and more snow that we'd get in any year up north - what gives.

One thing that was kinda cool was we stopped for gas in Winslow, Arizona and it brought to mind the Eagles song - "standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona" - so we both walked over to the corner and just hung out for a little while - it was too cold so we retreated back to the warmth of the truck.

Anyway, we checked into the Hotel Santa Fe Hacienda & Spa and it's the only wholly-owned aboriginal hotel facility in all of Santa Fe and it's really quite cool. The shuttle they have here is an old british taxi (they brought two over from England for their shuttle) that takes you anywhere in town that you'd like to go so we jumped in the lorry and Thomas took us to one of the local southwestern restaurants for dinner. Dinner was great (hot green chili's) and when Thomas came back to pick us up we asked him if he could take us on a little tour of the downtown plaza area as everything's closed on Sundays and we wanted to have a look before we headed out to Oklahoma City tomorrow.

Thomas was great, toured us downtown, took our pictures and even let me get behind the wheel of his lorry. Very nice and pretty likely we'll return to Santa Fe but as recommended it will probably be in September or October. One good note - Santa Fe has the cheapest gas so far - $2.89.9 - next cheapest was $3.19 in Bellingham.

Enjoy the pictures and we'll update things from Oklahoma City tomorrow night.