Drive to Dallas

John rear-ended an SUV in his Corolla, so Chieko volunteered me to drive our Corolla to Dallas to let him borrow it for the summer. I headed out after work on Thursday, May 27. I always love a road trip, especially if I have time to stop and see whatever is along the highway.
The first interesting sight was a full moon rising over the red-rock mountains south of Moab.

Wilson Arch, right on the highway about 10 miles south of Moab.

My plan was to make it to Cortez Thursday night, and I arrived there about 12:30 a.m. I chose the same hotel Randy and I had stayed in in January. Although the floors required wearing shoes, the sheets were clean, and it was the only place I knew at the late hour. I paid $40 for 4-1/2 hours of restless sleep.

This is Shiprock, the formation for which the town of Shiprock was named. I didn't take pictures of the town, because this is the saddest town I have ever driven through, and I have pictures from a previous trip.

The quickest way to go from Salt Lake to Dallas is through Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma. The second quickest way is through Cortez and Durango, Colorado; Farmington, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Amarillo, Texas; and Dallas. I've been on both those routes, so I chose the slowest route, through Cortez, Colorado; Shiprock, New Mexico; Gallup, New Mexico; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Roswell, New Mexico; Carlsbad, New Mexico; Midland, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; and Dallas.

The highway in the above picture leads from Shiprock to Gallup. It is being upgraded from an old two-lane road to a four-lane divided highway using stimulus money from the federal economic Recovery Act. I drove this on a Friday, when I would imagine it gets as much traffic as any other time, and I could not figure out why this road was selected for the investment. There just isn't any traffic. I could name a lot of other roads that get a lot more traffic, such as the dangerous highway through Spanish Fork Canyon and Price Canyon, or the road from Price to Green River, or the road from Moab to Monticello.

This is one of the nicer homes along the Shiprock-to-Gallup highway.

An LDS church. The missionaries live in a trailer on the other side of the fenced-in church.

Can someone explain to me why gas at this station in the absolute middle of nowhere New Mexico is $.35 cheaper than the least expensive Chevron gas anywhere in Utah?

One horse from a small heard of wild New Mexico horses.

Gallup homes.

Gallup has a beautiful red-rock formation to the east of town. With an oil refinery and train line.

Train to nowhere.

When Randy and I drove back from Dallas after helping John move there seven years ago, we kept passing side roads that I wanted to explore but didn't have time. This homestead is on one of the side roads, which goes to El Malpais (Spanish for Badlands) National Monument.

The biggest attractions at El Malpais are large lava flows. I didn't have the shoes or water for a 14-mile hike across lava, but I did have time to drive to an overlook above the lava valley and to Ventana Arch (in the background here).

I did walk a few hundred yards along the lava trail.

Back on I-40 heading to Albuquerque, I passed numerous signs warning against drunk driving and providing a phone number for reporting drunk drivers. Then I passed this memorial put up by the state. It's called Memorial of Perpetual Tears. Each marker represents one person killed by a drunk driver in New Mexico over the past five years. I'm not sure how many markers are here, but they must number in the hundreds.

Albuquerque is pretty much just another city, but it does have an Old Albuquerque section, where the old downtown has been turned into shops and restaurants. It's a fun little place to visit.

And if you don't buy jewelry from this guy, he'll break your arms.

Just before Santa Rosa, I turned off of I-40 and headed south toward Roswell. There is life out here, but I think it's all beyond the horizon.

This is a rest stop. After reading the sign I decided I could wait until I got to a gas station.

Why do they need a fence?

I am certainly glad someone is caring for these public lands.

Speaking of gas stations. I passed several gas stations on I-40 and didn't realize that this big four-lane divided highway going south passed through a lot of desolation with no civilization or gas stations.

My gas gauge dropped to about a quarter of a tank, and there were no living towns or functioning gas stations anywhere. Just a lot of openness. I did have cell phone coverage, though, as Randy called me about this time. I figured if I ran out of gas I could call someone, or I could sit and wait for an alien to beam me up.

There is life out here. And I did finally go through a town called Vaughn that had a gas station, with gas cheaper than in Salt Lake. When I got a chance to look at a map, I realized it was the only town before Roswell, which I figured would have been about 30 miles farther than my gasoline would have taken me.

Now we're in Roswell country. I thought the Roswell alien stories were a lot of fabricated fun. But I have a little suspicion that this might be an alien posing as an earthling.

What did you think Roswell was famous for? Yes, milk, of course.

I stopped at the only alien souvenir shop that was open after 5 p.m. I got here about 8:30 or so.

This is Gene. He knows everything there is to know about aliens around Roswell. I think he might actually be one. He went on and on telling me about the three crash sites, showing me the locations on a well-worn map. Actually there were two crash sites and one landing site. Apparently I had passed one crash site on my way into Roswell. Some archeologists discovered the aliens at the landing site camping out. The archeologists were angry, because they were supposed to have exclusive rights to dig there, and they had the aliens chased down and captured by the sheriff or Air Force. Then all the living and dead aliens and their spaceships and debris were whisked away in a truck and a Buick to a U.S. military base in New Mexico.

Gene related all these details as if they happened yesterday (July 1947) and with the excitement of a first telling.

Oh, what attracted the aliens to this location were the U.S. nuclear bomb making and testing. They were attracted because they were used to nuclear fission, which occurs in stars, but these bombs created nuclear fusion. They first visited Nagasaki and Hiroshima but found only residual radiation. Not so interesting. In New Mexico they found the mother lode of bomb making. The weird winds around Roswell's north-south and east-west mountains are what caused the aliens to crash.

That's the synopsis of the 45-minute lecture, which would have gone longer, but the store was supposed to close at 9 p.m., and Gene's wife or Mork called looking for him.

The cactuses were in bloom.

Artesia is between Roswell and Carlsbad. It's named after all the artesian wells around here. I assume they're water wells, but this place is definitely an oil town.

The night before passing through Artesia, I stayed in Roswell in another National 9 motel. I called Motel 6, but they wanted $80. I would rather sleep in my car than give Motel 6 $80. But National 9 was only $50.

Driving to Carlsbad, I passed several signs advertising White's City. The cowboy who discovered and explored Carlsbad Caverns was named White, and the city is right at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Actually, the city is a closed-up motel, a couple of souvenir shops, and a road department building. I wanted to stop in White's City to stock up on flashbulbs, since I haven't seen them anywhere since cameras stopped using flash bulbs about 20 years ago. But then I forgot to stop.

The canyon leading up to the caverns is thick with cactus, mean old bushes, and tiny little burs that stick to your socks, shoes laces, and pant legs and are miserable and painful to pull out.

I squatted down to take some pictures of the amazing cactus flowers, and when I stood up I discovered a bunch of cactus spines sticking in my pants bum. Luckily I discovered and pulled them out before I sat in the car.

If you look closely at this cactus leaf (is that what they're called?) you'll see that not every bump on this cactus is a group of spines. The row along the bottom is a column of cactus bugs.

The flowers are certainly pretty, if well protected.

This is the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. You can take this hiking path in, or if the hike is too much, you can take an elevator into the Big Room, which is the main attraction at the cave. Well, the main attraction besides the bats. Just above this path is an amphitheater, where, if you come at 7:30 at night, you can watch hundreds of thousand of bats fly out of the cave in clouds. This place is kind of stinky.

Luckily, once inside the cave it splits to the left and the right. The bats live in the left side, and the tourists go to the right. Farmers used to mine the bat guano to use as fertilizer. It was 40 feet deep in places.

If you take the elevator down, you miss the passageways and a sense of the length of the cave. I'm guessing the hike into the cave, around the main room and to the elevator (the only way out) is about two miles. Scientists estimate this cave is 50 miles long. And these mountains, the Guadeloupe Mountains, are full of caves, like Swiss cheese.

I'm not sure what this kind of formation is called. Stalactites hang from the ceiling. Stalagmites grow from the floor. When they meet they become a column. There are also curtains and other stuff. All of it is called decorations. Really, that's what the scientists came up with, decorations.

This is a large stalagmite.

And another one.

The caves were originally reefs under an ocean, made from the exoskeletons of living animals. Hydrochloric acid mixed with water and washed away the rock, leaving the cavern. The formations are made mostly of gypsum, which is what sheet rock is made from. The experts think the gypsum was made from some chemical reaction between the acid and who knows what. I'm not an expert, as I think I got this whole story mixed up. It did have something to do with oceans, reefs, acid, and gypsum. That's all I remember.

Because they're made of gypsum, the formations are naturally white. They get color from impurities such as iron (orange). Any green is algae that has grown due to the lights the Park Service uses to illuminate the cave. The temperature in the main part of the cave is always 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is 90 percent.

The Park Service has left some of the old explorers' equipment. There's also a rope that goes 200 feet up into the ceiling. The explorers used a balloon the raise the rope to the ceiling and then snagged it on a stalactite. Then they convinced one of the less intelligent explorers to climb up the rope. He didn't die.

These workers are actually cleaning the cave. Do they know how big and covered with dirt this place is? More government stimulus money putting people to work?

A column.

This is the Big Room. You can see people on the other side, as the trail goes around it. The loop around the room is about one mile. This room is 8.2 acres, or the area of 6.2 football fields. It's the third largest cave in North America. I don't know what the other two are.

Back on the road. This is west Texas. What isn't farmland is brush (creosote bush?), cactus, some grasses, and no trees until you get much farther east.

I just thought the name of this road was funny, because the Bar J Wranglers used to do a joke where Babe thought one of the boys called him a goat head (they said "Go ahead.").

When you live in oil country, and all of southeast New Mexico and west Texas is oil country, you have to expect an oil well anywhere, even in the middle of your golf course. The entire town of Eunice actually smelled strongly of oil. Not a pleasant place to pass through.

Really, these wells are everywhere for hundreds of miles. And where there isn't a well, there's a drill making a well.

I'd like to come back to Stanton, Texas, June 12-13 to see what the Sorehead Days are all about.

This is near Abilene, where I turned off to visit the Buffalo Gap historical village.

The village has buildings from three periods: the 1890s, 1900s, and 1920s. I didn't realize how these old gas pumps worked. The customer would request a certain amount of gas, say five gallons. The attendant would hand pump gas into the glass container, which had the gallons marked on the side, until it reached the five-gallon mark. Then he'd open a valve and let the gas drain into the customer's vehicle.

An old Firestone tire in the gas station, which was a gathering place for the men of town.

Dr. Pepper is a Texas staple.

This courthouse is in its original spot in Buffalo Gap. The other buildings were brought here to make up the historical village.

The only armadillo I saw on the whole trip.

I stayed in Midland, Texas, on Saturday night. I found a Day's Inn with free Internet access (I'd been stopping in Day's Inn parking lots the past couple days to check email) for $50. It was about the quality of a Motel 6, except for the Internet, a hair dryer, and free breakfast, which consisted of cold cereal and do-it-yourself waffles. But the woman in charge wouldn't provide Pam or some other spray-on oil as other hotels do, because "It makes the pan sticky." Huh? So I had to pick my waffle out of the waffle iron grooves and ended up with a scrambled waffle, a melted plastic fork, and a bowl of Raisin Bran.

Finally, I'm in Dallas. Irving, actually. This is Elliot with a helmet I got at Carlsbad Caverns.

Happy 4th Birthday, Mei!

Wells has gained a considerable amount of weight since the last time we saw him. Not that he's fat at all. It's just that he had had jaundice and was thin and didn't seem to be growing. Not a problem anymore.

While at the Day's Inn in Midland, I bid via Priceline on a 3-1/2-star hotel in Irving and got this Marriott for $50. The hotel even gave me (and, I suppose, the other seven guests in the hotel that night) a room with a balcony overlooking the little lake. Seriously, I counted eight cars in the parking lot. It was the Sunday night before Memorial Day, and there just were no business people to stay here. I should probably have bid less.

The Dallas Forth Worth airport, US Airways terminal on Memorial Day 2010.