In July of 1997 Elizabeth and I drove from Phoenix to Alabama. On this trip we drove through the white sands of White Sands, stopped in Roswell to check for aliens, visited the site of the bombed out Federal Building in Oklahoma City, listened to the blues in Memphis, and generally enjoyed each other's equally but differently bizarre world view. Did you know there is really a town in the Texas panhandle called Bovine? Guess what Elizabeth ate in Amarillo? Join us as we relive this fun trip.
We drove from Phoenix down to Las Cruces, New Mexico on Tuesday. We took highway 70 through the mountains instead of taking the interstate through Tucson. It was very beautiful in places but not terribly exciting. The most interesting thing that happened was stopping at a Tastee Freeze -- the only restaurant on the entire drive from Phoenix to Las Cruces was a Tastee Freeze -- and it had one picnic table with an anthill under it. You know, those tough little mountain ants with the big teeth. They chewed on my feet while I chewed on my food.
I thought it was fun to check into a hotel with a teenage girl. No explanation was asked for, and I offered none.
We ate at La Posta in old Mesilla, a Mexican restaurant that is a favorite of mine when I travel to Las Cruces on business. It has been there forever and has served any number of famous people.
On Wednesday we drove from Las cruces to Roswell. We stopped first at the White Sands Monument. White Sands is a huge gypsum deposit at the low point of the Tularosa Basin, which includes the White Sands Missile Range and the Alamogordo region, of atom bomb fame. The basin is completely enclosed by mountains, and rain washes gypsum from gypsum layers in the mountainsides and deposits it at the lowest point in the basin. The area is several miles on a side and consists of dunes of white sand that look like huge snow drifts. An entire little ecosystem has developed there with plants that have adapted to the ever-shifting dunes and little animals that have adapted to the all-white environment. I tried to get a picture of a light blue lizard but he scampered away.
Traveling east toward Riodoso, the landscape changes fairly quickly from desert to grassy hills to forested mountains. The mountains are different from typical western mountains, and in fact reminded me a lot of the Smokies. The scenery east of Riodoso is spectacular, with the highway winding through grassy mountains above green meadows and orchards. The weather was stormy, and we saw some spectacular lightning, sometimes looking down on it.
We arrived in Roswell about a week after the big 50th anniversery celebration of the flying saucer crash, and it seemed like they had rolled up the sidewalks and tried to forget all the hoopla. We weren't even able to find much in the way of T-shirts or souveniers.
The UFO museum is in an old theater downtown. It has blowups of newspaper articles, documents, and first-person accounts of whatever happened there in 1947. No mummified alien bodies or significant flying saucer parts, though.
When we arrived in Roswell yesterday I went in to check in at the Best Western and found that it had a plush lobby with a little fountain and elevators and a nice restaurant just inside with people in suits sipping white wine and I thought, gee, fifty bucks get you a pretty nice room in Roswell. But they didn't have our reservation, and the lady asked if maybe we were at the other Best Western. There's another one? Oh, yes, look, you can see it from here across the street and up a block or so. Sure enough, we were at the other one, the poor man's Best Western.
Our Best Western had a little tiny office instead of a lobby, a card box instead of a computer, and outdoor entrances to the rooms. It was a very nice room, but we felt a little let down after seeing how the other half lives. The hotel had a free breakfast for us this morning, but the milk was sour and the fruit was old and the coffee was not very good. Elizabeth said we should go across the street and see if they were having croissants and cappuccino for breakfast there.
We left Roswell and drove through Amarillo toward Oklahoma City. Elizabeth passed her first 18-wheeler on a two-lane highway. We stopped for lunch in Amarillo and I had a Texas barbeque sandwich that had three kinds of meat on it and enough cholesterol to choke a Texas longhorn. Elizabeth went across the street to a New York bagel restaurant. Who goes to the Texas panhandle to eat New York food, I asked. I do, answered Elizabeth.
In Oklahoma City, we ate downtown in Bricktown, which is an old warehouse district that has been restored and converted to restaurants and night clubs. It's a fun area, highly recommended.
After that we found the site of the bombed-out federal building. The street that the building faced has been closed, and the site is surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence on three sides. The entire fence is coveed with little tributes and memorials to the people who died there. Elizabeth and I stood in the rain for twenty minutes and looked at these things. It's easier to comprehend a tragedy like this when you can focus on individuals. One item was a key ring with a picture of a dog attached. Your dog misses you. There were T-shirts and baseball caps, flowers, license plates, and lots of stuffed animals. A first grade class sent a big sheet with pictures of each child and messages from the children to their teacher. There were many pictures of children that were killed. There was a birthday card to a child who would have turned six. There was a typed fathers day message from a troubled teen-aged boy who wrote about how hard it was to go to a fence to talk to your father. This was a difficult and sobering experience.
On Friday we drove to Memphis. We spent most of the evening on Beale Street. There is tons of live music both in the bars and restaurants and on the street. And there is just about any brand of music you want. I would like to go back there some time when I am not tired out from several days of traveling.
We had an easy drive back to Huntsville.