Around 1am we receive a call from a Los Angeles number but we were so confused due to the lack of sleep that we were too late to pick up the phone. As it is just a few minutes before the alarm would go off, we then call the travel agency in Belgium and explain our problem with Avis. They will immediately do the necessary in order for us to be able to get the car. At 4am we call them again - as it is in Belgium already noon (and they close at 1pm and we do not want to get stuck here for another 2 days as it is a long weekend in Belgium) - as we did not get any news yet and at 4.45am we get an update from the travel agency just before they close. They confirm that we have to wait until we get a call from Jetair and if Avis still refuses, we should start our trip and make the new reservation (which means pay again!) and keep all the invoices/documents so we can get these additional (high) costs refunded once we are back home as it is not our fault.

Around 6am we finally get a phone call from someone from Jetair that everything has been arranged, we got a new reservation number and we can go to the airport to pick up the car. We immediately freshen up and get dressed for the airport when suddenly we get another call from.... Avis Albuquerque to tell us that the new reservation number is still not working and we can not come to pick up the car. We are furious, we really had it with the rental company! We call back to Jetair and give them the phone number for Avis Albuquerque so they can communicate directly! Meantime, we wait...

Around 7am we get a call from Jetair that we will have to pay again and recuperate it later!!! We are not happy with this but we had enough of all this and get ready. We take a taxi to the airport and around 7.45am we arrive at the Avis office.

It was now someone else at the desk, she was very friendly and able to activate the original voucher! Apparently they just had to add the letter T followed by our reservationnumber... does Avis not communicate this to its employees???? So due to their employee's ignorance we did not sleep a whole night after a long flight and we lost one day of our holidays! Of course now there is another problem... our voucher mentions one free fuel tank but the employee says that we have to return the car full?! So where is the free tank??? As we really had enough of the hopeless discussions with them, we do not discuss this any longer and decide to mail the travel agency about this and they have now 3 weeks time to get this problem fixed before we return the car.

We finally get our rental car, a very nice and big 4x4 and drive to our next hotel. We are dead tired and hungry so we have a nice breakfast at the Egg and I just next to the hotel, we check out and finally we can start our trip around 10am. Today we had planned to drive to the Great Sand Dunes National Park but due to the delay with the car we will NOT make it and we decide to have a quiet day.

On our way to Alamosa (where we will stay the next two nights) we see some female deer and a pronghorn.

If you like UrbEx and old cars, this is the place to be!

While driving we see some small tornado's and a whirlwind. It has rained a lot on several places.

Around noon we arrive in Alamosa and check in at the hotel. We have lunch at Milagros and inform about a good place for dinner. They recommend an Italian restaurant a bit further down the street. We walk to that restaurant called Rialto and check the menu, looks nice.

We get back to the hotel to relax a bit, get our luggage organised and freshen up. Around 7pm we drive to Rialto's. We have small pasta dishes (which are big enough) and a nice Zinfandel wine. Around 8.30pm we are already back in our room and go to sleep. The light switch turned off the lights but it also turned us off...

Daytrip approx. 345 km