Any bad taste that our immediate arrival in New Mexico left was completely rinsed out today when we made a quick detour to Santa Fe before heading to Flagstaff. Liz said it best when she determined that if Boston and Provincetown had a baby with an affinity for art, the ability to speak Spanish and a desire to live in the desert, it would be Santa Fe.
We were all starting to get a little punchy from all the confined driving and the lack of any real contact with people other than gas station employees, hotel clerks, and our waitress last night who, as she brought out our food, broke into a hacking coughing fit and explained that she was just getting over pneumonia so it really, really helped that Santa Fe was so charming. Most importantly, it had probably the best Tex Mex that I'll ever have in my life, especially given my lack of any real desire to visit actual Mexico. We're not really getting in all of the awesome nighttime funfests that we thought we would on this trip, so we decided that getting a bunch of margaritas at 11:00 AM would be a good idea, since we had the opportunity. We did, and it was.
Santa Fe had ton of kitschy fun stores that sold a ton of kitschy fun Native American paraphernalia like wolf t-shirts and dream catchers and also really legitimately beautiful jewelry made of desert stones that I'd never seen before. Of course, all of this paled in comparison to Dinosaurs & More which had geodes and epic oil paintings of dinosaurs and little porcelain tiny dinos and fossils that they were just selling for far less than they were worth. Seriously. $300 for a dinosaur? I would fully expect to fork over thousands. If we weren't already crammed into this car it would probably be loaded down with so many petrified remains that were found in California and Arizona and New Mexico. I guess maybe dinosaurs aren't as big a deal out West because they have so many of them buried haphazardly in the ground that people just stumble upon them while planting flowerbeds. If they only knew.
Interestingly enough, Santa Fe did not have the Southwestern desert climate that we all assumed it would; there was a solid amount of snow and ice everywhere. Who knew? Even so, all was not lost because we did see a tumbleweed blow by on our way out which helped to preserve the desert expectations set for me by television, movies and Disney World. The Disney World thing makes this particularly funny because I have to keep reminding myself that all of this is actually real and not just a Disney-fied representation of the truth, so there are tumbleweeds in New Mexico, but there is also snow and there really are prairie dogs in the prairie but they don't actually just pop consistently up from their holes for the viewing pleasure of passing drivers.
Our immediate arrival in Arizona was a real trip. We passed a solid amount of inexplicable weirdness on this stretch of I 40-W, including cement tee pees, some sort of nuclear power plant and a stegosaurus made of Christmas lights just hanging out in a field. Driving along 40 W at night is probably one of the freakier things I've done, it literally feels like if you were to stop at all, even for a second, your car would promptly be attacked by wolves. Oh, and also- it snows in Arizona, too. A lot. How come nobody talks about all of the skiing opportunities in Arizona? I must have just missed those conversations because I was too busy listening to everyone going on and on about the fact that Arizona's a sweltering, arid desert. That is what road trips like this are good for, I think. Not so much about the destination, but everything in between that you run into and get to confirm exists, once and for all. Except for the desert wolves. I'm totally fine just keeping those a hypothetical.
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