Gallup, NM
I’m in Gallup, New Mexico tonight. Today’s forecasts along the route were “scattered thunderstorms” along the route I was taking (I-40). What they didn’t mention was that they’d be over my head much of the way.
Not too far into Arizona, there was a brief thunderstorm which wasn’t bad at all – I got wet, and the breeze cooled down what was otherwise a hot day.
I stopped for gas and lunch in Flagstaff, AZ and not 15 miles out of town, the skies darkened and the weather looked very nasty up ahead:
It got a lot worse very quickly:
This is just before both of my cameras quit working. Maybe 2 miles past this, it got to the point where visibility was less than 50 feet. I took the next exit and took refuge under the canopy of a Shell station in Winona.
I left the Atom under the canopy and walked inside the station, still wearing my helmet, jacket, and driving gloves (all of which were soaked, like everything else I was wearing). There were a lot of people taking shelter in the station. Among others, we were joined by a highway patrolman and a sheriff. I had just completed the purchase of a roll of paper towels (to dry the inside of my helmet) and was wringing out my gloves over a garbage can when the power went out. Fortunately, the power came back in about 5 minutes or so. The station staff sent us all back to a normally-closed dining area (with formica furniture) to sit out the storm. I shared the paper towels with a pair of motorcyclists (a husband-and-wife team, I believe) who were also soaked through. Most of the other people just got somewhat wet when running from their enclosed cars into the station.
I struck up a conversation with one of the station employees, and said “Correct me if I’m wrong, but a) isn’t Meteor Crater about 25 miles from here, and b) in a desert?”
She replied that she’d called home (about 6 miles down the road) and it wasn’t raining there. The storm hovered over the station for about 45 minutes, with nearly no movement of the clouds in any direction. Eventually it died down to a drizzle and a bunch of us got going again.
It continued to rain on and off, but was warm enough that I could get mostly dry. By the time I got to Gallup, NM (my planned stopping place for the night – 400 miles from Needles, CA) it had just started raining heavily again.
I asked the manager of the hotel where the restaurants were, and she said “Get back on the interstate and go 4 miles to the next exit…”, and I replied that I didn’t want to risk that in an open car, given what I’d been through. She was very nice and took pity on me, and had me call in an order to a Chinese restaurant and then she drove down there to pick up the order and bring it back to me.
Depending on the weather, I may be stuck in Gallup again tomorrow – stay tuned.
