Days 34: Zeroing in Grants

May 24: I woke up and got a text message from Evenstar that she was arriving into town soon. She had been taking the same route I had into town but was lagging a day behind, and I knew there was no cell phone service most of that distance since I had just walked it and hadn't gotten service until rather close to town. If she had a signal, she was, indeed, quite close! I hadn't expected her until later in the morning, however, since close to town didn't provide a lot of nice stealth camp sites. I would have expected her to have camped further outside of them where it was more pleasant.

She'd tell me later that she had gotten up at some crazy hour like 3:00am to start hiking because it was so miserably cold and she wanted to warm up. So she had been hiking all morning! Most of it was well before sunrise.

Blake's Lotaburger

So we quickly arranged to meet at a park near the post office. Evenstar had packages to pick up, and I still had my laptop to pick up. We'd meet up since I needed to go to the post office anyhow and catch up. She expected to arrive perhaps a half hour before the post office was scheduled to open, so I left my hotel room a bit earlier than I originally planned and walked the mile or two to the park next to the post office.

Evenstar was already there when I arrived, and I told her updates about Pez and Addie. Pez was already in town--arriving at about the same time I did--but had stayed on the red line the entire way. Addie was nearing Pie Town but thinking she'd get off there. She had only started the trail with the intention of hiking for about 6 weeks before going home and her time was coming to an end. It was all but certain that we wouldn't be seeing her again on the trail, and there wouldn't be a reunion of the four of us in Grants. =(

Evenstar and I joked that she was probably cheating with another trail family.

On our way back to the hotel, Evenstar stopped at Blake's Lotaburger for breakfast burrito. She had worked up quite an appetite the last several hours. Then it was off to the Motel 6. We didn't know if they would check her in so early in the day, but I said she could hang out in my room if there weren't any rooms currently available.

I didn't actually write in my journal if a room was immediately available or not, and I actually don't remember. But it if there was a wait, I'm sure it wasn't a very long one and when it did come time to check in, she wound up in the room right next door to Pez's room so we knocked on Pez's door to let him know about his new neighbor. He answered the door, but was itching to get back on his phone playing some sort of game online with friends from Germany. He, apparently, spent the whole day doing this. It was something of an obsession for him.

Then we all went to our own rooms for the rest of the afternoon. Pez played games online. Evenstar chatted with her husband and did some work on her laptop. And I caught up with work stuff, fixing bugs and replying to emails.

We did get together again in the late afternoon. Pez's German friends--eight time zones ahead--had to eventually sleep so he was no longer sucked into his game, and we headed out to the Denny's mostly because Pez still wanted to try a Beyond Beef burger. They were out of them at the Denny's in Lordsburg, but he'd have another chance here.

Pez takes a photo of his Beyond Beef burger.

 

He concluded it tasted like a regular burger and it was good, but perhaps not worth the extra cost. We sat around Denny's for a two or three hours chatting it up before heading back to our own rooms for the night.

And thus ended a nice, relaxing zero day in Grants!

I was still very disappointed about the mining museum being closed, but I look around the exterior a bit to see what they couldn't fit inside the museum. I hadn't realized it was closed due to the pandemic until I tried going to it today.

We're in 2021--officially the 20s!--but this place isn't so roaring anymore!