2008 - OCTOBER - NEW MEXICO

NEW MEXICO HERE WE COME!!

On Sunday, October 5th, Judy Jones and I left for a very long road trip. We drove the first day to Oklahoma City and toured the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing Memorial. We ate dinner at a cool restaurant along the river that runs through town and then drove until we got tired, and spent the night at a Comfort Inn somewhere. The next day we drove and drove some more. We were in Oklahoma for quite a while, and there was pretty countryside and interesting sites along the way, but I was most fascinated by the huge windmills that went for miles and miles. I had never seen any, and while most people I mentioned them to aren't that impressed with them, I think they are much more pleasing to the eye than an electrical power plant. They looked like giant dancing robots on the tops of the mountains. If I was listening to the right music I could sit and watch those things for hours. For some reason they remind me of WallE. Trying in some little way to help clean up the mess we humans have made.



ABIQUIU

We crossed over into Texas and I instantly got bored. Texas is a state that I can get a gut full of traveling through in a hurry. I don't have anything against Texas, we go there all the time to buy and sell horses, and have had some great times there. Billy Bobs in Ft. Worth is one of my favorite places in the world and we've made some great memories there, but the highway scenery is terrible.

We drove for about eight hours and made it to our destination for that day, Abiquiu, New Mexico. All we did that night was find something to eat and go to bed. The next day we had plans to tour the Georgia O'Keefe Home and Studio, but when we went to get tickets, the woman at the desk told us that tickets must be bought several months in advance. Who woulda thunk it? I guess we looked at her like she had two heads because she went on to say that people from all over the world come to see the Georgia O'Keefe Home and Studio. Whatever. We could take it or leave it. We asked what else there was to do around Abiquiu and she said "nothing". Well, I already knew there was the Ghost Ranch outside of Abiquiu. But first, I wanted to check out "inside" Abiquiu. We decided to have lunch at the Abiquiu Inn, which is next to the Georgia O'Keefe Tour Center, then we looked through the gift shop, then set out on our own "tour".

The town is surrounded by mountains, and tower after tower of layers and layers of rock. It really is beautiful and still relatively untouched. It's inhabited mostly by natives of the area and the only industry is tourism and arts and crafts, so it's somewhat impoverished, but still very quaint. We drove around in the Appalachia-like hills, up many dirt and rock roads (probably trespassing a time or two, but I figured they were accustomed to ignorant tourists), only to get to the end and have to turn around at a dead end or in someone's washed-out driveway.

We went back into one neighborhood, and I use that term loosely, as it was more like a compound. There was a fairly good sized mission-type church right next to what looked like a dive or honky tonk. There were several houses, some of them more like huts, and some of them had shops in them. We stopped at one hut/shop and went in. There was no one in sight, but we knew someone was there because there was the very strong aroma of something wafting through the door from the back of the house and it was not an old smell. It was the aroma of marijuana being smoked. I went to lots of concerts in the 70s and I know that smell. A few seconds later a very large, very mellow-looking Mexican/Hippy man appeared and asked if he could help us. We told him we were just looking around the town and we asked about his shop. He said the shop was a family business and everything in it was made, painted or crafted by a member of his family. He sold paintings, and small sculptures of birds and animals and jewelry. He had fabrics and yarns for sale that were colored with dyes made from the native vegetation. He also gave us a good bit of history about the area. He took us outside and showed us that just a few yards away, was Geogia O'Keefe's home, which was surrounded by a very tall stone fence. I had read about the 3 acre hacienda she had bought in 1945. We then told him about our experience at the Georgia O'Keefe Tour Center when we went to buy tickets, and how the lady told us there was nothing else to do there. He said that while Georgia O'Keefe had done much good for the area, the people that ran the Tour Center had not been kind to their town. He gave us the inside scoop on places to go and how to get there. We asked him if it was alright for us to go inside the church and when he assured us it was, off we went. It was a very simple church, but beautiful, and Catholic, of course. It was very similar to many Episcopal churches I have been in here. We poked around in the church for awhile and then headed North out of town.