I'll apologize at the start that we've become a little lax at updating this thing. We've been spending a lot more time out in the woods and in the desert these days than we have in swanky internet cafes and hotel rooms.
Right now we're at Hotel Blue in Albuquerque getting ready to head to the National Museum of Nuclear Science before we hike and camp near Jemez Springs. Laura and I both agree that New Mexico is thoroughly amazing. We've spent four days here so far. The first day we camped out in the middle of the desert off an unpaved road. There was no one around for miles and aside from the occasional prolonged yip yip of a pack of crazed coyotes it was actually really peaceful. We went to Carlsbad Caves and saw the bat flight in which hundreds of thousands of bats flow out of the caves biggest opening like a cloud of smoke. We also took a walking tour, which in comparison to the crawl-on-rocks-bruise-everything tour we did at Mammoth Cave was super tame, but we both enjoyed it. It's an incredibly beautiful thing to see.
We headed up to Roswell after that. Their annual UFOfest was going on and we arrived just in time to catch the "parade." It consisted mostly of a firetruck, a bunch of kids and adults in very homemade alien costumes and a car with the Grand Martians of the parade: Jefferson Starship. I'm not even kidding.
The Fourth of July was spent mostly at White Sands National Monument, which is a nature preserve in the middle of a stark white desert. It's also in the southern portion of the missile base where many of the atomic bomb tests took place. We didn't run into any irradiated nature that I know of, although we did see a lot of creepy albino lizards and who knows maybe we've become radioactive ourselves which is what I've been really hoping for.
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White Sands is a land of cognitive dissonance. It was screaming hot when I was there, and so bright that I had to squint at all times, yet to my eyes it appeared that I was surrounded by massive snow drifts. At one point a bunch of locals showed up with sleds and taboggans, which confused things further.
ReplyDeleteYou guys have visited some of my favorite places in the world; Austin, The Alamo Drafthouse, West Texas, the desert in general, Carlsbad AND Mammoth Cave... I hope you're having a grand time.
My first night in Albequerque for my friend Travis' wedding, we were hanging out in the sauna at the hotel where his mother was staying and these two squat, round old women lowered themselves into the sauna with us. We started talking to them and apparently they were the "Witches of Roswell" and apparently are well known. They told us that they had lived in Roswell for generations and that their great grandfather was involved in Roswell and that the aliens and spaceship that crashed weren't aliens at all but actually us (humans, not you and me) from the future. Apparently in the future we create synthetic bodies to house our souls (because we fucked up our real bodies too much apparently) and then travel back in time to take healthy human samples back to the future to help re-create human kind. They totally freaked my shit out.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm jealous you got to see Roswell. Sounds like you guys are having a gorgeous time. And thanks for the postcard! Totally incredible. Be safe and eat more tacos.