Healthvues

Andy gets up early to meet the tow truck (still 10 degrees wind chill, who thought that Texas could be so freaking cold??? But now at least it is brilliant sunshine) and misses a great complimentary breakfast, hot eggs and all the fixin’s (been in the south tooooooo long) and goes off with the tow truck driver to determine our next financial fate…..Amen, there is an angel on our shoulder (yet again, poor angels, we have definitely put them on OT during this trip…..thank you thank you thank you…) and the damages are only $250 for the previously diagnosed alternator problem…..We hit the road again, after Mary has a meltdown over the whole situation….Ya know, things just kind of build up after a while….the little things in life like having no home, not knowing if your car is going make it to your destination, realizing how much you’ve uprooted you’re life, etc…… As much fun as all of this is, it still has it’s stresses, as does everything ….Having said that, we are very flexible people and adjust fairly quickly to our circumstances…..Drop back and punt….We hit the road again just a few hours off schedule (as opposed the dreaded few days) and the road is open before us, the sky is bright blue for as far as you can see, which seems like forever in this open prairie country and none of us have killed each other and left the bodies for coyote bait…I’m thinking that this day has promise….. But man this place is FLAT – you’ve never seen flat and desolation like this. This is not “Florida” flat – there are absolutely NO natural visual reference points. No trees, no hills, no lakes – it’s indescribable in words and photos – it’s like an IMAX of nothing! You can almost see the curvature of the earth, it’s so flat. And no signs of life for miles. When it does appear, it’s an isolated ranch in the middle of nowhere. Where’s the Starbucks?! Even a Cracker Barrel (we’ll lower our standards out here)?!

Made it to Tucumcari, NM and were glad that we didn’t make it our destination last night…..Every thing happens for a reason….believe it….Pretty disappointing. We had this romantic notion that we’d spend the night in the famous Blue Swallow Motel – one of those quintessential neon Route 66 motels (there were many such motels here – and several still exist: The Pony Soldier, The Apache Motel, The Palomino, etc.). We also thought that Tucumcari would be more restored that it actually was. Route 66 is the main drag and it’s a real contrast in time periods. You have the old rusting abandoned diners, the surviving establishments and the group of new Holiday Inns and such. It’s easy to imagine this place in its heyday – with the streets filled with travelers and the motels booked to capacity. But seeing them in daylight now, we’re glad we didn’t push through last night.

We did stop of a famous Rt. 66 establishment: TeePee Curios (yes, shaped like a giant teepee) – the kind of tacky souvenier shop that dotted the route. Of course we dropped $30 on glow-in-the-dark, dashboard Virgin Marys (seriously, we did!), Route 66 root beer and a keychain pig that does things that are unsuitable for description here. We briefly considered eating at one of those surviving diners (untested, smoking and Mexican equals a bad combination), then a Sonic Drive-in, but opted for the “safe” bet: a Denny’s diner…..Suffice it to say we will suck it up and eat those dreaded power bars that we have packed in case of snowstorms next time…..ughhhh…

Our next Route 66 stop was Glenrio, an old watering hole that became a ghost town when I-40 bypassed it. Glenrio now has about 2 human residents, 100 feral cats and several very decrepit buildings and structures that were once bustling with travelers. Route 66 is actually a 4-lane highway here, so it was very eerie standing in the middle of this “superhighway” with no one else in sight, the wind making strange noises in the old buildings. I swore I heard strains of “Dueling Banjos…” A few pictures, a few thoughts and it’s back on the road again.

It is truly amazing how much a day can improve with the change of terrain…..I can’t tell you how beautifully impressive and calming and comforting the New Mexico road has been….Ohmmmmmm…. The flatness of Texas gave way to the mesas and then mountains of New Mexico – the picture postcard kind. I (Spike) spent most of the late afternoon watching the endless sunset over the horizon and soaking up all of the many hues that accompany that very phenomenon as I once again was very grateful for this wonderfully, complicated, emotionally charged day that I call my own reality….and as a general cure, I can only tell you that the patience and mutual love of my traveling compadres and Springsteen in my headphones once again lifted me back to reality…..I’ll let Springsteen take it from here…

“well I’m no hero, that’s understood, all the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood/ with a chance to make it good somehow/ hey what else can we do now? Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair …well the night’s busted open these 2 lanes will take us anywhere…we got one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings for some wheels…climb in back heaven’s waitin’ down on the tracks….ooooh come take my hand, we’re ridin’ out tonight to case the promised land…ooooh thunder road, oh thunder road, thunder road…it’s lyin out there like a killer in the sun, I know it’s late but we can make it if we run…sit tight, take hold thunder road….tonight we’ll be free…….”

You get the drift….. ‘Tis a beautiful country we call our own and may you all be blessed to see and appreciate it the way that we have, or more importantly, everyday in your own way, in your own routine, big or small……. Our next multi-day stop is Santa Fe, NM. On the desolate desert road through the mountains, the crystal clear sky offered billions and billions of stars – a sight not seen in metropolitan areas. Annie saw our first shooting star. We pulled into Santa Fe’s Inn and Spa at Loretto (definitely NOT your average Holiday Inn Express – we’re treating ourselves) at night and began to feel the effects of that damn Denny’s.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Westward Expansion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.