We took our time on Wednesday, but we got on the road at about 10 a.m. to head to Albuquerque. As I mentioned in New Mexico: Rolling with the (weather) changes, we were trying to get out of Logan before the season’s first snowfall hit.
Despite the fact that the snow was supposed to stop by 5 p.m., it wasn’t going to disappear overnight due to temperatures in the high 20s. That would have made our trip to Albuquerque on Friday very dicey, as we’d have to make sure there was no ice or slick roads for the RV.
Propane
Our first stop was to get propane at Love’s in Tucumcari. While we could have gotten it closer to Albuquerque, we wanted to make sure we had a full tank. 17.8 gallons of propane later, we were on our way.
We always check the satellite map overlay when choosing a truck stop or gas station for propane, especially near a busy interstate. It helps to know in advance if we’ll need to come in a certain way to line up at the tank, since our propane tank is on the driver’s side.
Errands
Once we got settled into our RV park, we headed out to some errands. We had sent a priority mail envelope via General Delivery to a post office near the Balloon Fiesta Park, but hadn’t been able to pick it up before we left to go to Logan. This is where our afternoon took a strange turn.
We got to the post office, and they’ve got a strange setup. If you want to pick up anything (certified mail, general delivery, packages, held mail, etcetera), they have a single window for that only. It’s one of those bisected doors, where the top half is open for the employee to handle items. The line is SUPER long, almost out the door. In comparison, the line for the regular sales counter is all but empty.
We finally get up to the window about 30 minutes after we got in line, and we get a serious runaround. “This post office doesn’t accept General Delivery.” Um, the USPS website says it does. “Well, we refuse and Return to Sender if it arrives here.” Nope, sorry, our Priority Mail tracking number shows it was delivered to this post office, and has not been returned to sender. Cue the post office employee calling in for reinforcements. They each repeated the same thing the initial employee said, and I pulled out the tracking number so they could look it up.
We were made to wait on the side, out of the line, while they did their search in the back. Lo and behold, the post office manager herself brought our Priority Mail envelope out, and advised us to send only to the downtown main station if we wanted to do General Delivery again. I pointed out to her that she needs to advise USPS.com to remove the “General Delivery” service from the information on the website, as I use the website to determine where to send my mail.
Let’s just say, we didn’t walk out of there confident that she’d do anything, much less contact USPS about removing a service. By the time we left, we had been there an hour.
We finished up another couple of errands, but when we got on the interstate, there had been a major accident on our route, so we pulled off and headed to dinner.
Dinner
I decided I needed chocolate after that debacle at the post office, so we headed to Cheesecake Factory for some Godiva chocolate cheesecake. 🙂
By the time we finished dessert, sunset was arriving, so we watched the beautiful colors in the sky.
All in all, it was a great travel day, but not a great errand day.
