week 18: sort of

Oh!
The places you'll go!

Cuba, NM. Aneth, UT. Monticello, UT. Dove Creek, CO.

Hooray! I just love going to places that are more than 100 miles away from the yard. You know, since nearly three hour drives are so much fun and all. By the way, that would be three hours one way. As luck, or the lack thereof, would have we have managed to draw the short (or perhaps long) straw on several recent jobs. By the way, that isn't the royal we either. It's the crew I've been rolling with since one of the supervisors has been out of town.

While the cities I named are all outside the San Juan Basin there is still oil and gas work to be done around them. They are certainly far, but Farmington is still the closest city with the sufficient oil and gas service companies to work on those wells.

The worst part about going far from the district is the going part. The drives are boring. There's only so much sweeping scenic majesty that you can look at and still watch the road. Then again, that's also one of the better things about going far form the district. It's like taking a mini road trip with a little bit of work in the middle. Plus, working in those places usually means working for clients we don't normally work with. That makes for an educational experience to see how some companies go about their operations. It also means that we sometimes do some ridiculously stupid things at clients' requests.

The best part about going far from the district is that these are relatively new places to go. Dove Creek and Monticello are reasonably scenic in their own ways though we received some suspiciously bad service in Monticello at one restaurant we tried to eat at. So we ate at a very good burger place in Dove Creek since that's where our motel rooms were. Cuba isn't so bad either. It has a McDonald's and is a good stopping place when going to Albuqueque. Aneth is, well, it pretty much sucks. The one place there is to eat other than the gas station closes at 3 PM. Plus, since there's sulfur in the oil produced there the whole town and field next to it smell like hydrogen sulfide. The one good thing about Aneth is that it produced the classic line (well, classic to me) of "Is that really necessary?" I'll explain it one day.