Day 4 - Steak Out

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Woke up early to watch F1 qualifying quite nerdily on the laptop via a VPN so that we could get the BBC feed. Button looks good but I think Alonso may take the win. If Hamilton makes it past the first lap I’ll be surprised.

Pete cooked us (giant) steaks for breakfast, with eggs and popcorn. We may not need to eat again for the rest of the trip!

Pete let Mark take out his Impreza STI which when you put your foot down has fearsome acceleration, and then the turbo kicks in and you appear to travel in time momentarily. Warp speed Scotty!

We left Pete & family to make it on our own, it’s like a cheesy coming of age movie! The plan is to take a 2 hour drive to our first stop, or maybe take the scenic route which may add an extra hour.

It turns out that going the scenic route adds an extra two and a half hours, so it was nearly 5 hours in total! 


Achievement: 100MPH

We arrived at the giant sand dunes, 30 square miles of dunes that reach 750 foot! Here are a couple of tips for you, don’t go wandering in the desert at 3:30pm, it gets hot, and if you take a cap, don’t take a sand coloured one because you can’t find the damn thing when you accidently drop it!

Leaving the dunes, Martin took his first drive thinking it would be nice and easy in the middle of nowhere to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road, in an auto for the first time. What really happened was that we had a Hitchcock style Birds attack except with millions of insects that splatted against the car meaning he couldn’t see a thing. This was made worse by driving into the setting sun (I don’t mean that he collided with it, just the direction!) and we literally couldn’t tell the colour of traffic lights or see the road at times. Being English though we thought it best to proceed with caution, a mere 5 MPH above the speed limit rather than stop and clean it with Mark screaming out things like ‘Sign’, ‘Stop’, ‘Police car!’ etc.

Some really steep roads into the mountains followed which were very picturesque, but coming down the other side we pretty much burnt out the brakes so had to drive down in first gear. No brakes and a 10500 foot drop isn’t fun!!!

Achievement: Broke the car.

Stopped for the night at Pogosa Springs as planned, and then went for some food in Hicksville. After food at about 11 we went to the outdoor spring. Mark upgraded our tickets to the Adult tickets which she said included the Golden Showers. 15 minutes of hilarious laughter later we figured that a Golden Shower has a different meaning over here… when in Rome :)

We thought that relaxing in nice warm springs at 12:30am would be nice after a long eventful day on the road. We comfortably lay in the 106F pool and decided to move on to the 113F spring, how much difference can an extra 7 degrees make? It turns out that the difference is 2 layers of skin and boiled bones! It wasn’t called the lobster pool for nothing.