Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Five: Albuquerque

 At the evening of day five we checked into the El Vado Motel in Albuquerque, a refurbished motel on old Route 66,  right in the heart of the city near where it crosses the Rio Grande (hence the Spanish name, which means ford). Albuquerque is the most "Route 66-ish" big city along the old route, in preserving the character of that old road and its place in America. 

There we linked up with Jessica's folks--his father and his wife, who had flown from New Jersey to meet us. The motel was pleasant and lively. We dined at a local downtown indoor hipster food mall, where we selected the dishes we each wanted from the various indoor vendors, and ate in the pleasant courtyard. The next day we went to the Albuquerque Museum, which was a very nice experience. At a nearby farm-to-market-style grocery (Jessica loves those kind of places), I noticed a "free library" on the counter by the cash register. It had a sign encouraging people to take the books. From my experience, one is doing a service that way, as there is usually not enough space for the donated books.  I took the copy of the Signet paperback edition of Hamlet, well-worn and marked up by its original owner many years ago from a college class, including the date and location of the final examination written in the inside flap. It's the kind of treasure I love finding. It is sitting on my shelf next to me as I type this, next to other titles in that particular Shakespeare paperback series. Someday I will own them all..

Albuquerque was very relaxed. Such a nice change of place from Phoenix. I liked it so much better than I did ten years before when I last visited, and found New Mexico too rough-hewn for my taste. Like Las Cruces, I was now ready to move there---the last place in America with slack. Thank God it exists.

Sweet Home Portlandia

Apparently, judging from the Twitter posts I actually am motivated to make, I am still an Oregonian, still a Portlander.

Arizona has easy problems. Everything flows from the fact that the elections here are crooked. 

By contrast, Oregon is a sort of a basket case, as it always has been mostly, but it got its act together for a while after Tom McCall. I got to see the best of those years, and left just when it started to go bad in a way that is only getting underway.

I feel compelled to stay in the fight going on there. Who'd have known that my heart and soul belonged there still? When others give on something is usually when my interest turns towards it. 

I'll never move back there, though, at least not to anywhere west of the Cascades. The looming threat of the giant earthquake makes me think everyone who stays there is volunteering to be part of a mass human sacrifice event at some point. No thanks. So long as she still exists, however, I will love that place they came to call Portlandia until I die. I chose it, and now it still chooses me. 

Our best show yet?

 Lastest episode of Spellbreakers. We got twenty downvotes, which is over twice as many as we usually get. It' also as many as other Badlands shows get but which also get five times as many upvotes as our show. We must be doing something right. Got a note from a friend/listener who said it was best show yet, me being the straight man to Patrick.  

Our New Mexico Trip --- Day Four : Trinity

Crossed the Jornada del Muerto desert, going west from  Ruidoso back to the Rio Grande Valley. Why'd they have to scratch out Oppie's name? Shame on them!

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Three: White Sands, Alamagordo and Cloudcroft

Las Cruces, as a small agricultural college town, reminded me much of my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado in the 1980s. It was relaxed and open, and comfortable. It was hard to leave it so soon, but in after our second night we checked out and drove northeast across the White Sands Missile Range, where the highway is sometimes still closed for missile tests. 

Our destination was the White Sands National Park, where one can leave the highway and drive out into the dunes. I didn't expect to love it so much. The gypsum sands, even shifting so as to threaten the road, are indeed about as white as they come. It was a moderate spring day. We parked at one of the pullouts and enjoyed several hours of sitting in one of the shelters. Jessica made sketches in her sketch books while I took notes in my notebook of the thoughts going through my head. There were many families with children, who love to sled on the dunes. It felt like being at the beach but without an ocean. It was as peaceful as I have felt in a long time. We were glad we had gotten there early, as the line coming into the park at the entrance was ferocious by the time we left.

From there we drove into Alamagordo, which is an interesting town. There is no downtown really. Just businesses along a highway, and lots of low income housing and poverty. Not a place that one would find easy to live. We meandered through the city, even attempting to visit the World's Largest Pistachio, a monument outside a roadside stand which turned out to be smaller than we expected. In fact, Jessica had thought it was a real pistachio that was oversized. It looks better on the postcards than in real life. 

The most interesting thing in town is the New Mexico Space Museum, which has an outdoor permanent exhibition of parts of rockets and missiles that were tested decades ago at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. 

From there we drove up into the mountains, which are the last bit of the Rockies going eastward, the last mountains until the Ozarks. We stopped at the Old Apple Barn and had some coffee and pecan pie and then found our motel in the mountain community of Cloudcroft, which is like a Colorado ski town. We had dinner at the Cloudcroft Brewing Company, a local pizza brew pub which was lively. I enjoyed their imperial stout (I always order the darkest beer). The ski season was just ending. It's always a good time to visit places like this. It was nice to see snow still on the ground. 

Outdoor exhibit of a rocket engine at the New Mexico Space Museum in Alamagordo

The Old Apple Barn on the way up to Cloudcroft

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Two: Las Cruces

We spent two nights in Las Cruces so as to be able to spend an entire day exploring the city, which was new to both of us. The hotel was a modern Holiday Inn Express which was crammed full of high school sports teams for the weekend. They put us right over the entrance so we heard the door opening and closing all night. Nevertheless the next day was spectacular. We went downtown in the morning to see the weekend street market on Main Street. The biggest prize there was discovering a fabulous used book store, COAS Books, which had one of the best science sections I have seen in years, no doubt helped by the presence of New Mexico State University in town. I picked up a number of treasures. In the afternoon we headed over to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, which was a terrific experience. Indoors was a wonderful exhibit on the nearby White Sands Missile Range, going through the history of rocketry. Outside we got a tour of the livestock and the vintage farm equipment. I could only think how much labor has been saved by the devices which have invented to cultivate and harvest crops.  They also had one of the best explanatory exhibits about dairy products I have ever seen. We found Las Cruces to be relaxed and accessible. By the end of the first day, I was almost ready to move there.

Our New Mexico Trip -- Day One: Stagecoach Territory

 Day One: Scottsdale via Globe on US-60 through the Apache Reservation, where we detoured on side roads to San Carlos, the town that is the Reservation "capital', the roads were full of yellow poppies from the rains. Stopped in Safford for lunch at a vintage hamburger stand we found, that had advertised in billboards on the highway.  In the afternoon, we made it to Lordsburg, New Mexico on I-10. It is not much of a town. I knew about it because it is mentioned in Stagecoach (1939), which is the movie that made John Wayne a star. It had been many decades since I was this way, in fact since May 1988 when I drove up from Texas to Oregon to go my college graduation ceremony. Going over ground like this feels like reawakening old parts of myself. Going East on I-10 we crossed the "continental divide", which there is just a plateau that separates the watershed of the Gila/Colorado (Pacific) from the Rio Grande (Atlantic). In the afternoon we checked into our hotel in Las Cruces, which is on the Rio Grande. It is small city, but was the largest population center since we left the Phoenix Valley

The Taylor Freeze in Pima, AZ (location). 

How to Hack Your Brain to Learn Science

 Spellbreakers from last week. Learn Matt's "Lazy Way" to master scientific topics in a short period of time.

The Desert Blooms for a Time

 Winter has turned into Spring. It was a wet winter, the wettest since we came to Arizona. The desert turned green with lushness and the rabbits multiplied ferociously. The green grass then turned brown quickly but the yellow flowers remain, and from eye level, the desert looks like a lush meadow.

I am still doing Spellbreakers with Patrick. We are on episode fourteen, as of last week. It has become somewhat of a challenge to keep up the theme that Patrick wanted, of "exposing scientific flim flam." The title makes me cringe. Patrick wants red meat. He has much more heretical views about science than I do. Every week is a challenge.

The show sucked up nearly all my creative energy until recently, including this blog. In the meantime, Jessica took a couple interesting road trips. In January we went up to Sedona to stay at a lodge that is in a canyon. The name escapes me now, but it is a spectacular way to spend a couple days. Then last month we took a two week trip to New Mexico that I will write a post about, which has become one of those trips that has shifted the course of my life somewhat. That is the best thing about road trips, and travel in general, is when it can do that. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it is spectacular. Last year's trip to Europe was the most transformative such experience in years, which is why I tried to write about it, and as usual, never finished the story. I stopped when I was in Poland. But that leaves out the rest of the trip. I will have to summarize that as well. It becomes more easy to summarize such experiences with time. When one tries to write about them in the heat of the moment, there is too much detail to describe. The essence of the experience becomes clear only after time.

The view walking in my "undeveloped desert" as of a couple weeks ago.