#18

February 6, 2008 Deep In The Heart Of West Texas

And the stars are indeed big & bright here.
But back to Pahrump. The only motel in town that wasn't a casino was full, so we checked into Saddle West Hotel & Casino. 'Nali was allowed, but not in the room alone, so we locked her in the car (she doesn't freak out in the car) for a bit while we went to eat & then I showed Megan what I know about video poker, i.e. not much. We flushed dollar bills down the toilet for a half hour or so & then bailed. Everyone was very old in Pahrump, except for our waiter, who was gay. The next morning we got the very worst coffee I've ever had in my life at the restaurant - evidently The Coffee Revolution has yet to reach Pahrump ("Where my motherfuckin' Starbucks be at?).
We were heading back to the Grand Canyon for the night; Megan wanted to touch base with some folks she'd met there & is considering going to work there. But first we had to get through Vegas.
I must say here, Megan & I have been picking obscure roads off the map knowing nothing about them, choosing them because they looked interesting or just because they went vaguely in the direction we wanted to go. And every one of them has been just fabulously scenic and beautiful. The road from Pahrump to Vegas was as well, and quite unexpectedly so. We tried to get through Vegas as quickly as possible, i.e. not very. But after that got to drive around Lake Mead, which was an improbable sapphire blue & over Hoover Dam, which, for some reason, did not look nearly as big as I thought it would. 'Course, I'd just come from Death Valley...it sorta re-defined 'big' for me.
And in the surprisingly pleasant little town of Boulder City, Nevada we finally found our Starbucks! Late that afternoon, the afore mentioned wallet mishap occurred, and what with all the backtracking didn't get into the Grand Canyon until late, but still managed to squeeze in time for a few beers with some Grand Canyon Boys.
And we were off again the next morning, heading south and for home. And I was again surprised at how beautiful the desert can be...I mentioned Flagstaff was nice, and Phoenix was horrific, but Tucson and even Las Cruces seemed much pleasanter places than I remembered them being. We went through a really creepy town called Casa Grande, though....it was very strange, there were acres and acres of brand new housing developemnts that all seemed to have no real reason to be there. It was about midway between Phoenix & Tucson, but not really close enough to either to be a suburb. There were almost a dozen brand new, not yet opened strip malls along the main road, but only one gas station. There really didn't seem to be that many people. The whole place seemed like it hadn't so much sprung up as been installed. Then off in the distance we saw a sinister looking industrial sort of complex and realized that some huge multinational conglomerate had their kitten-killing factory there or something, so we ran for our lives.
After spending last night in Lordsburg, New Mexico, when we got to Las Cruces this morning we decided to get off I-10 and take a roundabout way around El Paso. I had several reasons for doing this, one of which turned out not to matter anyway - it seems that the Border Patrol is smarter than I am. We drove up into the mountains northeast of Las Cruces and through White Sands Missile Range. Who would have thought they'd put a Border Patrol Checkpoint at the end of White Sands Missile Range? But there it was. So Megan & I got to chat with some very, very nice Border Patrol Agents and became acquainted with their friendly dogs before they finally - and to our great relief - sent us on our way.
Then on through Alamogordo and into our last mountains and Lincoln National Forest. Through a few pretty mountain towns like Cloudcroft and Mayhill and then out onto the most nothing I've ever seen. It wasn't even really desert...just nothing. Through a pathetic little town named Hope whose fire station had burned down. No, really. Another grim communiity called Artesia (Town Motto: Not As Bad As Nocona, or, At Least We Didn't Burn Down Our Fire Station.) Continued south through Carlsbad and into Texas, on through Pecos and rejoining I-10 at Ft. Stockton. We had planned to overnight there, but, quite unexpectedly couldn't find any vacant rooms. I theorized that there was a Large Brightly-Colored Truck Convention in town, but one desk clerk told us that it was all the oil field workers & workers building the nearby windmill farm. Mighta been a good place to find a date, but not, evidently, to sleep so we grabbed a pizza - meeting a baby-faced young man on his way to Killeen & ultimately Iraq - and pushed on another hundred miles to the next town, Ozona, where we are spending our last night on the road. I think San Antonio's only about 200 miles from here, so we'll be home fairly early tomorrow.
Frankly, neither of us are all that happy about it.