Thursday - June 30, 2022 - Roswell NM to Amarillo TX

 

Hotel breakfast in Roswell, even though we could have gone next door to the alien Dunkin place. 

Today we focused on all of those roads that nobody drives on. A lot of long lonely stretches with absolutely nothing on them. And it was kind of lovely.  The first stop today was Bosque Redondo Memorial at the Fort Sumner Historic Site. Why the hell has nobody heard of this? In 1863-66 or so the US Military marched thousands of Navajo and Apache people from their native lands hundreds of miles to Fort Sumner. At its peak they had 9000 Native Americans there. It was a failure because there was bad water, no food (the Union had a hard time feeding their soldiers during the Civil War to begin with), and they consumed all the wood within a 20 mile radius in a short time. At the end of the Civil War, General Sherman came down and saw what a disgrace it was. They agreed on a peace treaty and let the Navajo and Apache people walk back home. I know these were different times but..

Seems every town has to grab onto something to lure the tourists in. Tombstone has "Gunfight at the OK Coral", Roswell has the "Alien Incident of 1947", and Fort Sumner has Billy the Kid. In the 1990's some Navajo high school kids wrote a letter asking why the town promoted Billy The Kid (killed 8 people and was hung at age 21) and nobody talked about the 9000 people imprisoned there. So they built a very nice memorial there. One of those places that is uncomfortable to visit, but is important to visit. 

Next stop Tucumcari, which is a RT 66 town full of 60's stuff and a great little railroad museum. The railroad arrived in 1902 and the town was established in 1901. It was the turn around point for the Rock Island line and the railroad that went on to Los Angeles. So the town was basically created for the railroad.

At its peak in the 1950's, there were 7 trains a day meeting there. But as the interstate road system was built and air travel got more popular, passenger train travel slowed and the town dried up. It is still a great little tourist town.

Next we took more back roads and stopped at a wind farm. The guy working there came out and we talked about the history of wind turbines. Turned out he used a lot of the sensors I helped developed back in my NRG Systems days, specifically the IceFree wind speed and direction sensors. Small world indeed.

Hotel and then dinner at a popular hole in the wall burger place. Heading to Oklahoma City next..

Wednesday - June 29, 2022 - Bisbee AZ to Roswell NM

 

I had not planned on blogging this trip but here I am. The second night I realized this trip might not be so much a drive back east trip, but rather a meander back east trip. So this one is from yesterday, Wednesday, if I can remember what we did..

A few last minute things to put in the car (so far no panic attacks because we forgot something), then south on 80 to Douglas and back northeast to Lordsburg on I-10. We stopped for gas, which was a lot cheaper ($4.99 in Bisbee and $4.49 in Lordsburg), then back on I-10 and a stop for lunch (Subway) in Deming. My playlist, Deb's playlist and a couple of podcasts burned up the day. Las Cruces, then Rt 70 to White Sands, past the giant pistachio in Alamogordo (thank you spell checker),  Ruidoso (spell checker did not know that one), then ended the day in Roswell. Dinner at Cattle Barons Steakhouse (nice salad bar). 

We saw the most beautiful cloud formations all day. We even got a little rain here and there.
We are getting back in the groove of one drives and the other does the research. 

There is a database (hmdb.org) of all the roadside history signs that I never stop to read so we can look them up as we drive along. Super helpful because it gives us a snap shot of any historical events that happened "on this spot in the year xxxx". It has a map showing any past or upcoming signs.

roadsideamerica is where you can look up weird stuff like "biggest ball of yarn" or "tallest stack of file cabinets".  A website or an app.

Wikipedia is where we get info on the history of any towns we drive through. It lists important people from there (John Denver is from Roswell), what businesses put it on the map, what scandals happened.

OK, that's all I remember from yesterday..