The Southwest: Texas, Part the Second, New Mexico, Arizona

Texas takes forever.

No, really. There isn't much to say about the portion of Texas we drove through on Saturday night. It seems like west of Austin, there's... nothing. Like really, nothing. Not even tumbleweed. At least along I-10, for sure. That is a terrifying trip, with crazy winds that were pushing the truck around in the pitch black. The stars at night may be big and bright out there, but not much else is! We fueled up at an abandoned gas station, slaughtered hundreds of mosquitoes on our windshield and grill, and saw another rest stop with so many crosses (some juxtaposed with eagles) prominently displayed, Joy thought we were in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Creepy is not enough of a word. LOLOL. I started to believe that Texas is really just an endless loop in the space-time continuum.

But then we hit New Mexico.

The first plan was to drive as far as we could on Saturday night - at least make it to New Mexico - so we decided on Carlsbad. Unfortunately, since we were working a flexible plan, when we rolled up on Carlsbad at about 1:30, 2:00 AM or so, and every hotel room in town (according to the dude at the Best Western, who was probably the sixth or seventh hotel we'd called), so we ended up driving another hour and a half or so to Roswell (we rolled up at about 4:00 AM), where we actually got a really nice hotel room for a pretty good price, and slept about as hard as we have on any part of this trip.

So we woke up and drove right out of Roswell - we had little interest in alien tchotchke. After hitting a diner that took an hour and fifteen minutes to serve us one piece of French toast, a couple of slices of bacon, some hashbrowns, and a breakfast burrito, we got rolling through NM in the daylight.

One thing that ought to be said is that the mesas out there are a little awe inspiring. They're quite incredible, and honestly, I felt during most of my time out there that pictures were a waste of time. I don't think a photograph is capable of capturing the size and grandeur of them. The other side of that, though, was the obvious poverty that seemed to pervade many parts of New Mexico. There were many run-down trailers and shacks sprinkled through the countryside, and much of it looked very depressed. The people there weren't unkind, but less openly friendly than in Texas or the South; there was something harder, I think, about the people there.

Aside from the mesas, though, I didn't think much of the landscape. There's a ton of small, scraggly, brushy little plants on a whole lot of dirt. LOL. Though overall, I much prefer New Mexico to Arizona.

Arizona, for the most part, looked a lot like New Mexico, only with sort of shockingly cartoonish advertisements for Indian reservations and goods off the highway. Huge, ridiculous teepees, "cave paintings," and other American Indian cliches littered the side of the road. On the one hand, it's pretty obvious that people on the reservation need to make money where they can, but on the other, it seemed like as soon as we'd crossed the boarder into Arizona, the means by which they had to do it was a matter of American Indian Samboism. It was weird and kind of sad.

People are, again, less friendly out there. They were looking at Joy as though they'd never actually seen a black person in real life before, and at a Mexican restaurant in Flagstaff, while I was sitting on a bench near the front of the place, waiting for my take out, this woman came up to me and asked, "Are you open right now?" So I guess brown people are always assumed to be the help in Flagstaff.

There's a little downtown part of Flagstaff that seemed to be geared toward college kids, and it was cute and funky. It's a very outdoorsy mountain town, with lots of places to get gear for snowboarding, skiing, and the like - but also, guns. LOLOL. Also, Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was pretty much the only game in town in Carlsbad, and they seem to be a pretty big deal out in the Southwest, and in this way, I can see really clearly how it's destroying the culture and changing economies. I'm guessing a lot of locally-owned hardware stores, grocery stores, general stores, and other sorts of merchants have been put out of business by the big blue beast, and it's just sad to roll up on Wal-Mart and see the people there. I don't know.

I'm losing coherence again, so I should wrap this up.

We saw the Grand Canyon, which was certainly a highlight of the trip. I do wish we'd had more time there - despite all the other tourists and the construction (yes! There was construction at the Grand Canyon - I think they were building a restroom at one of the lookout points), it was still incredibly humbling and beautiful and moving. I could have sat there for hours, just meditating on the size of it, and the size of we tiny things scurrying around its edges.

But alas, we had to get to LA, which was still eight hours west.

The rest of Arizona was generally unimpressive and long. It was mountainous, yes, but still shrubby and brown. It was a good feeling when we got to California - but that'll have to wait. :D

Cross Country

Cross country seems like one of those weird concepts that was never more than an abstract to me until it started to happen.

I still don't think it's begun to sink in for me yet - so far, we've been through places that are reasonably familiar. Monday, we got off to a pretty late start, which when combined with the fact that we had to pick up my license from the DMV in Jersey, made the first leg more of a mini-leg - about a seven-hour trip (including stops) to Philly. Since we started at 5 PM, and the scenery from New England through New Jersey isn't that varied, it was pretty much strictly about covering distance.

And also, dinner at Red Lobster in Connecticut, which was fun and funny.

Yesterday was a significantly longer day. The thing here is sleep; it's important that we be well-rested, or driving for hours and hours is not going to work out. So since we got into Philly at 1:30, we didn't roll out to the DMV till about 10:30 or so, and didn't get on the road until 11:30. That said, we got to Nashville by 1:00 (though granted, we did change time zones, but it still counts). This was maybe the longest day of our trip, and for me, certainly the most familiar. I don't know how many times I've traveled down I-95 into the South, but the Mid-Atlantic still feels vaguely like home.

Traveling west through Virginia was new for me, certainly. Being from a state as small as New Jersey, and traveling most often between Boston and New York, it's easy to forget that most other states are actually way bigger, and that you can easily spend most of a day driving through one of them. I don't have any staggering cultural insights; as we moved further away from urban areas, I became slightly uneasy and enamored, probably in equal measures. The Shenandoah Valley and western Virginia are beautiful, certainly; green and green and green, with a gorgeous blue sky (pics later). The people, when we stopped, were in general warm and friendly - again, no surprise. But I also noticed that as we moved west, brown folks became increasingly more rare, and there was the odd look here and there. Though nothing really offensive, I don't think.

But it's pretty funny - of course, as soon as we got to the Real South, we saw signs for guns and fireworks. Then we saw the Biggest Cross Evarr (well, maybe not Evarr, but it was huge and prominent and surrounded by Quality Inns and Shoney's and McDonalds' and Pilots).

Unfortunately, it was dark as we drove through Knoxville, but it was a strange thing to go from total rural - like nothing, nothing, nothing - to a full-on city with very little transition time. I know that's how it happens in the South, often enough, but we were driving a long ass time without seeing any signs of human life (aside from the food and fuel stops, which kind of don't count) before Knoxville kind of popped up. It seemed pretty; it would have been nice to see.

But now we're in Nashville, and it's raining, I'm pretty sure - I heard some pretty loud thunder earlier. But I'm interested to see it - see what the flood did, and how it looks. What it feels like.

Then, Memphis! BBQ! Graceland! And oh yes, there will be pics of all.

And THEN, New Orleans!