Dragon Slayer

8/11/2016

Well, I had a bunch of options of places to go this morning. And I chose to… do none of them! Originally, I had planned to head down to White Sands National Monument. But a friend of mine recommended that I also visit the Sacramento Mountains while down in that area, and so I figured I would instead save that part of the world for next year’s trip to Reno. I had planned on being home on the 14th, which would give me plenty of time to check out another destination, but a glance at the weather radar told me that I wanted to get home earlier. A depression promising monsoon-like rains was forecast to hit my area of the country pretty soon, and I really dislike camping in rain. It’s not so much the tent getting rained on that bothers me – my tent is good and watertight – but packing up wet stuff is pretty awful. Particularly when the wet stuff then has to sit in your 50-year-old car for days on end.

So I made the decision to just carry through to Carlsbad for the night, where I would stay before going to Guadalupe Mountains National Park the next day. Boring decision, I know, but you try getting rained on while trying to cook hamburgers for three days straight! Ugh. It’s just as bad as having the sprinklers turn on and spray directly into your grill when you’re trying to make dinner (which is something that happened in Holbrook, by the way).

Anyways, so I just headed along east on the now-very-familiar stretch of Route 66 / I-40 that I seem to occupy so often these days. I might as well live in Albuquerque, really. Fortunately the views on the highway are quite nice! I wonder how many times I’ve taken pictures of these rocks now.

This picture is probably the most accurate one that I have of the red rocks of the southwest this trip - camera has been acting up but it got the colors in this one pretty good.

Just liked the giant flag with the awesome rocks/mountains and clouds in the background. Unfortunately, this semi truck kind of obscured the best part. Oh well.

Speed limit sign prominently displayed and likely summarily ignored.

Every single one of these billboards is for the same place! Talk about overkill advertising. 

I got on down to Roswell, NM and figured I’d stop for a bit as I’ve never really stopped there before. For those not in the know, Roswell is one of the more peculiar places in New Mexico – and New Mexico has a lot of peculiar places! It’s a town entirely overrun by alien memorabilia and conspiracy theorists. Apparently back in 1947, some of the townspeople saw some aliens crash-land and they just never let it go. Even more than half a century later, these people are still on about aliens all the time! Nuts. I was going to stop in their official town alien museum – the International UFO Museum and Research Center – but alas, when I got there it was closed for the day! It’s definitely on my list of places to visit though. I just really want to know what kind of research they do there.

Disappointed in the lack of alien sightings (outside the hundreds of statues scattered all over the town, that is), I scooted on to Carlsbad to make myself some more hamburgers. Yes, when I’m on the road, I will eat that tin foil hamburger meal literally every day of the week quite happily. I think I ate it almost exclusively for two months straight back in 2014 and I still wasn’t tired of it when I got back home. Call me low maintenance! Anyways, that’s about it for the day – short post I know, but really now I’m just trying to beat the storms.

 

Like this storm over here.

And that one over there.

Oh, and some of you who are more observant (or obsessive) may be wondering why the hell I named this post “Dragon Slayer”. ‘Maybe,’ you may be thinking, ‘it has to do with how Jane fearlessly tackles any challenges!’ And that would make sense, but you’d be wrong. No, this has to do with one of the odder things about owning this car. This has to do with Jane’s propensity for destroying dragonflies.

I’m fairly sure that we may be responsible for some minor decimation of dragonfly populations, if not full-on genocide in some areas. I think that killing dragonflies must satisfy some destructive need that the car has. Or maybe it’s just entertaining to see how grossed out I am when I have to clean up the mess. Whatever the reason, when I stopped for the night in Holbrook, Jane was proudly displaying no less than five dragonfly corpses. Dragonfly wings sprouted from every gap in every body panel like trophies.

It was (and still is) truly disgusting.

UGH. Giant, headless, and still moving.