Waking up on the
urban farm we meet all of our host’s animals, the chickens, guinea pigs, goats
and rabbits. The incredibly cute, cuddly
animals have completely destroyed her backyard.
Our host is happy, living a vegetarian life surrounded by animals,
earning her keep through Airbnb rentals.
She provides insightful information on all Albuquerque tourism
opportunities. She occasionally refers
to her dining room table, littered with maps and brochures, handing us the
relevant ones.
Today we visit the
Petroglyphs National Monument, a bit outside of Albuquerque. Volcanic activity created basalt escarpments
covered over time by a dark desert patina.
People learned to make pictures on the boulders by carefully pecking
away the patina revealing the lighter gray rock underneath. The monument
preserves 20,000 fragile images painstakingly tapped into the rock by ancestral
Puebloan Indians, the Spanish who followed them, and finally the Anglo
ranchers.
Stopping at the
visitor center, we gather the all-important national park stamp for our
national park passports, our first stamp of the trip. But my stamp is a bit blurry. Never fear!
We stamp a piece of paper clearly.
When we return home, we’ll carefully cut out the better stamp and glue
it into my passport. Is this a bit
obsessive? Yes.
Bloodroot and I
have separate national park passports.
Back in the 1990s, we bought my passport on our very first trip together
when we visited the Grand Canyon. Since
then, through stamps, we've recorded nearly every trip taken in the
States. (We do occasionally forget to bring the passports along.)
Establishing his blossoming
manhood and maturity, Bloodroot purchased his own passport in 2012. Returning home following that trip, he color
photocopied, photo shopped and searched the internet to create stamps identical
to mine, capturing the same date and color for each stamp. He then carefully
cut out each quarter sized stamp and glued them onto the appropriate pages in
his passport. He calls this his four
hour ode to Paul Distad (my father) his OCD grandfather.
Today’s extensive
travel plans necessitate exploring only a few short trails in the Monument. We hope to see some petroglyphs. Despite park literature to the contrary, the
boys are sure we’ll find at least one accessible trail. Sensing potential, they
send me down a sidewalk. Looking
good! The sidewalk ends in a hundred
feet. Sven and I return to the picnic
table. The boys disappear, climbing up
the Mesa Point trail wandering through cinder cones. At the trail’s peak, they see the Sandia,
Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Still no blood they report.
Meanwhile, I look
up to see an almost hazy blue sky.
Brilliant sunshine pours down on the volcanic rocks. I sit out in Mom’s Norwegian sweater and a
sunhat and write my five pages. (My
hands refuse to work after five pages.)
The boys wave to me from the top of the hill they've climbed. They return down the trail. I’m watching little wispy clouds and the same
mountains in the distance.
Using the spotting
scope in the picnic area, I too can see the macaw petroglyph, the park’s motto.
Leaving the park,
we enjoy a too leisurely lunch with best friend from sixth grade. We catch up on our lives after forty years’
separation. Around two, we part once
again, dropping her off at her apartment.
We shop for gas, ice, and food.
By 3:45, loaded up
and ready to go, we leave Albuquerque bound for Carlsbad, a journey we believe
will take three hours. Error! We had originally considered sleeping in
Roswell and forgot to update our spreadsheet when we decided instead to sleep
in Carlsbad, actually five hours distant.
(Naturally, as an accountant I plan all trips on Excel
spreadsheets. I’ve proudly passed this
legacy on to Bloodroot.)
Ah well, off we go
down 285. Leaving the mountains behind,
we see plains stretching to the horizon covered in desert scrub. Eastern New Mexico rolls eternally before us. Vegetation becomes sparser as we speed
south. We encounter very few other
vehicles. Solitude descends upon our car
like a bell, surrounding and containing us, muffling our disturbance of the
endless landscape. Pearl worries. How will anyone admire her youth, power and
beauty out in this endless desolation?
The sun sets; we
drive on. Arriving in Roswell at night,
we see a few spaceship logos on hotels and restaurants, not much else. Only one alien spaceship flies over our
car. Unimpressed, Pearl sniffs, “Is that
the best they could do?” She planned a
technology competition with the aliens, confident that she’d win with her
retractable ramp.
After Roswell, we
see more traffic. In another hour, we
come to Artesia, a town full of petroleum factories that we smell long before
we arrive. Amidst a trackless desert
visited only by aliens, lights erupt from the huge industrial complex, slashing
the sky, completely destroying any feeling of night, quiet and solitude.
One last hour
hurtling through the dark brings us to our destination-the Rodeway Inn in
Whites City New Mexico, located conveniently next to Carlsbad Caverns.
We find a
veritable handicapped palace in the Whites City New Mexico Rodeway Inn. Who would have thunk it? We have a low bed transfer height equal to
the wheelchair height. I so struggle
trying to get into high beds. When your
hip flexors break, you can’t raise your knees to climb into bed. Over time, I've developed a mechanism where I
sit on the bed and violently throw myself back, using momentum to hopefully
fling my legs into bed too. In case of
failure, the animals stand by to assist with my errant limbs.
We have a roll in
shower with a stool for me to sit on.
The toilet has bars hung beside it. I've seen bars directly above the toilet
tank. What possible use would a bar
above the toilet tank be? I mean, even
if you’re a guy? Would you place both
hands on the bar in back and let your penis just fly free? This would be really gross.
And I can roll
under the sink to wash my hands.
Needless to say, all doors and pathways to the bed accommodate Sven. I
write notes singing the room’s praises to the staff and on the internet. I don’t know if all Rodeway Inns have these
amenities, but I know where I’m staying next trip!
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