We are on a road trip to New Mexico and Colorado, with a week in Albuquerque (timed to watch the lunar eclipse), a week between Santa Fe and Taos, and a week in Denver. This previous post covers why we picked Albuquerque as our first stop to see the lunar eclipse. Since the drive each way from the east coast is 3 days, the total trip will be 4 weeks. It will be an interesting test of our ability to live as digital nomads, and also a good test of how much it will cost to do this on a regular basis.
This post is specifically about the road trip heading west.
Detour to Ohio
We live in Jacksonville FL, and to head to Albuquerque NM it is pretty much a straight shot west across I-10 and then a few hours north once reaching New Mexico. However, the primary reason for going west and visiting Albuquerque in the first place, was to find a good place to see the lunar eclipse, which would be in the early morning hours of Wednesday May 26. But a more important priority was to first pick up our daughter from college in Ohio, about a week before. Since she wanted to come with us on the trip, and our mode of travel would be road trip in our own car, we had no choice but to first drive from Jacksonville to Ohio to pick her up, and then from Ohio to New Mexico. The shortest distance from Jax to ABQ is 1641 miles, but an Ohio detour adds over 700 more miles to make the total one-way trip 2358 miles!
Our daughter’s college is about an hour from Columbus, but in the middle of nowhere, so we make Columbus our home base when making these trips. With this being her 2nd year in school, we’ve done this drive quite a few times now, and I’ve optimized the trip to minimize the use of interstate highways (with more traffic and trucks to deal with), focusing more on using more rural US and State highways. You can see the general route here, which is pretty much straight north, and hardly has any interstate highways!
Even though we were due to pick our daughter up Tuesday afternoon, the drive to Ohio was done on Saturday and Sunday, so we could do more of the travelling on the weekend, and save the weekdays for working.
Asheville NC is about halfway, which is really convenient for us, because not only is it a great place to spend the night, but it allows us to check up on our rental properties.
The first half of the drive takes us through Jesup, Statesboro and then Augusta GA, then Greenville SC, and then to Ashville NC. On the 2nd half of the trip, we take I26 from Asheville up to Kingsport TN, and from there take US-23 up through Virginia and Kentucky. US-23 in Kentucky is also known as the Country Music Highway, with roadside attractions, and signs when you enter each town noting the famous country music professionals who came from there. That highway also passes through Pikesville KY, the location of the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud. In Ashland KY, we cross the Ohio River into Ohio, and then take a bunch more state highways up into Columbus.
The most notable part of our Columbus stay was the discovery of a great restaurant/bar called Pierogi Mountain. We love pierogis, so this was an amazing discovery. We stopped by for lunch on Monday, and they had a long menu of pierogi options, as well as other tasty eastern European specialties. In addition to pierogis, we had potato pancakes, bratwurst and cabbage haluski for our meal, and delicious funnel cakes bites topped with a strawberry sauce for dessert.
Day 1 west: Columbus to Wichita
The route that I wanted to take from Columbus to Albuquerque is 1476 miles, which is a lot to squeeze into 2 days, especially when trying to find a place in the middle to stay for the night, given mid-west cities can be very far apart.
The day we picked our daughter up from college couldn’t really be a driving day, because we couldn’t pick her up until the afternoon, and then we had to take some of her things into storage for the summer in Columbus. But we would have time for a relatively short 3-hour drive to Indianapolis. It was nice to pass through Indianapolis again. At one time, we had a portfolio of 5 rental properties in Indianapolis, and so we had taken many trips there, but we sold those properties in 2019.
The first day of driving would start in Indianapolis, and end in Wichita KS. Wichita isn’t quite in the middle between Indianapolis and Albuquerque, but close enough, and it would give us a longer first day and shorter 2nd day.
In the spirit of picking routes with hopefully less traffic, I opted to avoid St. Louis, so the route that day was I-74 and I-72 through smaller cities of Illinois, and once crossing into Missouri, it transitions into US-36. We eventually hit I-35, which took us right through Kansas City. At the end of the day, I was able to take a detour onto a US highway, catching US-50 at Emporia, KS and taking that west for about an hour, to I-135, which goes right into Wichita.
I was happy with the driving day, being able to avoid the heavy traffic highways. In fact, US-36 through Missouri is also dubbed the Chicago-Kansas City Expressway (CKC), which has been promoted as a way to drive between those 2 cities to avoid the more major highways.
Passing through Kansas City, we were tempted to stop at one of our favorite BBQ places of all time (Jack Stack) for burnt ends, but given all the eating we were already doing, and the length of time that stop would take, we passed it over.
Day 2 west: Wichita to Albuquerque
The drive on day 2 was pretty straightforward, US-400 west out of Wichita, which eventually connects with US-54, which makes it way southwest, eventually hitting I-40 for the last couple of hours in Albuquerque.
This day was very enjoyable. The weather was great, although with a strong headwind to hurt the gas mileage, and we enjoyed the scenery being very different than what we are used to on the east coast and northeast. The land was basically very flat, more dusty looking, and covered with small bushes instead of big trees. With the strong wind, there was sometimes tumbleweed blowing across the road.
The route also paralleled freight train tracks, and so for most of the day, we were driving alongside the tracks, and saw lots of long freight trains heading in both directions (see photo at the top).
Liberal, KS is where we stopped for lunch, which is also the home of Dorothy’s House and the Land of Oz exhibit. I took the tour with our daughter, which starts with a walk through a replica house like Dorothy’s, decked out how it would have been in 1930’s time of the movie. Then you walk through an immersive experience where you are guided through several of the scenes of the Wizard of Oz, meeting all of the characters and major scenes. The tour finishes with time in a memorabilia room, which includes the actual model house used to film the tornado scene.
The afternoon saw us driving south and west through Oklahoma, Texas and then into New Mexico. As we went, the landscape grew more sparse, we saw more tumbleweed, and hit more areas that seemed completely desolate, and at times with no cell service! But eventually we hit I-40, and completed the final 2 hours into Albuquerque.
After the drive this day, I now have a better appreciation of the ‘high plains’ portion of the US. Even though the landscape seemed completely flat all day, with no hills or mountains in sight, we steadily increased altitude from 1000 feet to over 5000 feet! Even though we didn’t drive up any mountains all day, we were already at a higher altitude then the Blue Ridge mountains in South and North Carolina! When we finally reached the Albuquerque area, we finally saw some mountains, touched 7000 feet as we crested them, and enjoyed a nice downhill into Albuquerque.
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
