SIDEHIKE.NET ROAD TRIP 2008

10. The stars at night are big and bright (clap, clap, clap, clap) deep in the heart of Texas, but they are bigger and brighter way out in far west Texas.

9. Believe it or not, there are people who go to convenience stores looking for health food. (We are not them.)

8. Skunks hate New Mexico so much they will take their own lives to escape it.

7. It just ain’t a road trip without jerky.

6. Despite what people may tell you, New Mexico is NOT hypoallergenic.

5. The cutest Border Patrol agents are in Arizona.

4. Bourbon and chocolate milk do not a mudslide make. (Or even approximate.)

3. Elvis is alive, and he’s busking on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona.

2. The best American pop music stations in So-Cal broadcast in Spanish.

1. If Los Angeles fell into the ocean, most Angelenos would be too busy yakking on their mobile phones to notice.

As David pointed out, I neglected to mention the kamikaze rabbits. But I did not neglect to mention the Benadryl bender, did I? That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. You’d be a bit loopy, too, if you were as hopped up on DayQuil as I was at that point.

With that said, I find it appalling that David made it through his rabbit report — and even mentioned Bambi — without making a Thumper joke.

Clearly we are both losing our edge as the trip comes to an end…

So when we last left off, our intrepid heroes had just arrived in Monument Valley, Utah — a vast expanse of high desert plateau in the heart of the Navajo Nation where giant formations of sedimentary rock jut upwards into the sky. We arrived late in the afternoon, and had just enough time to get settled into our room at the lodge before running up to the lone restaurant in the area to watch the sunset as we ate. Sorry, but there are no pictures of that. I left the camera in the room, and I was too busy with a bowl of delicious pork and green chile stew to have gotten much in the way of photos anyway.

After dinner we could have joined the other guests at the lodge for the nightly John Wayne movie showing, but we instead went back to the room so Dave could catch up on work and I could sort through the 6 gigabytes of photos I took at Bryce Canyon. We went to bed somewhat early, planning on attempting to rise equally early in case we had to alter our remaining travel plans due to weather.

So we crammed our gear into Norm around 9:00 AM (hey, it’s early for us) and set off southbound towards Arizona. We had both spent our working hours the night before listening to music to pass the time, so neither of our iPods were charged when we got in the car.

No problem, I thought, and I reached over to hit the “scan” button on the radio. We knew there wouldn’t be much in the way of radio reception out here, but we had a laugh when it went all the way around the dial twice before landing on the lone station in the area — a Navajo-language spot on the far left-hand end of the spectrum. Not being Windtalkers, Dave and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on in the chant emanating from the speakers, but it wasn’t long before the DJ (still speaking in Navajo) transitioned into Rod Freaking Stewart’s “Motown Song.”

I shit you not.

When Cortez came to the New World he brought devastating diseases with him: Smallpox and Rod Stewart. After much deliberation, Dave and I still aren’t sure which was worse. (But we’re leaning towards the latter.)

Shortly after we concluded our debate on Rod’s merits (he lost big points for taking Rachel Hunter from us) we crossed into Arizona and headed east towards the Four Corners.

What is the Four Corners, you say? I’m glad you asked!

According to Wikipedia:

The Four Corners Monument marks the quadripoint in the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Tribal Lands in the Southwest United States where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet.

Or perhaps a better way of putting it would be:

The Four Corners Monument is a tourist trap run by the Navajo Nation that charges a fee for people to come and celebrate two imaginary perpendicular lines arbitrarily drawn by someone else’s government.

Hmm. Perhaps the Wiki needs a little editing … Another time. Back to the recap.

So when Dave and I saw that they were charging a fee to stare at what essentially amounts to a glorified surveying stake, we turned our trusty steed Norm around and got back on the main highway. At this point, we didn’t want to waste a bunch of time anyway. The previously mentioned ominous weather forecasts were still in the reports on the radio (between two more feckless Rod Stewart dirges) so we decided that we would waste no more daylight with sightseeing at worthless monuments or historical markers. Especially since it was cold and windy, and by this time Dave was coming down with the coughy-sneezy-nasties, too. (We place the blame squarely on you, Jason.)

A couple hours later when we got within sight of the Nacimiento Mountains, we knew we had made the right decision. Highway 550 runs due east right up to the edge of the range, at which point we would have the choice of taking a left and enjoying a scenic winding byway going around the mountain range and bringing us into Santa Fe from the north, or we could hang a right and make a straight shot down to I-25 and hit Santa Fe from the south. As we looked ahead of us, the decision was clearly made for us. The weather line appeared to be divided along the same latitude as the road, with snow to the left, and mere clouds to the right.

We only stopped to pee, get gas and stock up on beef jerky (prioritized in that order) and we made it to our hotel in Tucumcari in just under eight hours, using a route that Google Maps insists should have taken almost nine, assuming no stops. Please don’t ask us how we did it. Feel free to use your own imaginations to formulate your own theories. We’re quite fond of the the ones involving worm holes, time travel and various other violations of the laws of quantum physics. Especially since those don’t involve breaking the laws of the state of New Mexico — WHICH WE WOULD NEVER DO.

We pulled into our hotel as the first few flurries of snow flirted with our windshield. We checked in, hauled in our bags, and headed over to Del’s Restaurant on the Route 66 strip (picture taken on my last trip through town with Brad) for dinner because man cannot live on jerky alone.

After stuffing ourselves with enchiladas and chicken and pie and ice cream, we went back to the hotel and took turns steaming out our heads in our personal sauna (AKA the scalding hot shower with towels plugging the gap under the door) while the snow began to fall outside like God’s dandruff.

We watched a little TV (where we were once again haunted by Rod Stewart in the form of a chocolate chip cookie), read the next day’s weather forecast, and started formulating backup plans should we be stuck in Tucumcari for the next couple of days.

When we woke Thursday morning, a solid 4 to 5 inches of the cold flaky stuff covered the ground, but the roads were clear of any cold slippery stuff, so we made our getaway while we could.

The drive through Texas was relatively boring, quick and uneventful until we started to run into ice just half an hour from Dave’s house. By 8:00 we had returned Norm to the rental car agency and were each back at our respective homes, ready to take our respective cold medications and fall into our respective drug-induced comas.

In the next few days we’ll be posting a few more pictures and a few more tales from the road. We will also make a posting or two about the many profound life lessons we have learned on this trip, just as soon as we have enough sleep and/or hindsight to make such observations. So stay tuned.

Thanks for following along, folks. It’s been a fun ride.

Goodnight and good luck.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Osmosis amoebas.

First, I find it shocking that Bo failed in his update to even so much as mention the Kamikaze Rabbit attacks.

As we were snaking our way through the pitch-black switchbacks approaching Bryce Canyon (including an incredibly long tunnel that cut through a mountain, and which looked like it should be the entrance to NORAD), we were having to keep our eyes peeled for deer. Lots of deer. Platoons of deer. I no longer feel quite so bad about Bambi’s mother, because apparently these little bastards breed faster than rabbits. They also apparently have better survival instincts.

So.

There we are, pitch black, trying not to run into any of the many deer lurking on the sides of the road. Then a jackrabbit runs full-bore under our right tire. Ka-thump, so long Peter Cottontail. We’re maybe another mile down the road, still making tasteless, anti-rabbit jokes like that one (”Did you see what kind of rabbit that was?” “I’d classify it as /lepus undercarus/.”) when another freaking rabbit launched itself from the other side of the road and under the driver’s-side tire. At this point all I can figure is that Norm the Rental Car bears some passing resemblance to The Black Rabbit of Inlé. So the good news is, if we messed up the suspension on the rental car, at least now it’s balanced out

Thankfully, we made it to our cabin without anymore encounters with suicidal animals, and we both got a much-needed night of peace and quiet.

Up at dawn the next morning–okay, not really, but there were roosters crowing while I was packing the car, so I’m counting it–and we spent the morning driving through Bryce Canyon National Park. We hit a half-dozen of the scenic vistas before doing a 180 and grabbing breakfast at the nearby trading post/general store/tourist trap.

Bo’s camerawork on the flickr stream will do a far better job conveying the variety of landscapes we passed through on our way to Monument Valley than I can. It still won’t–can’t–convey the sheer sense of scope and size of the scenery, but it’ll have to do. Unless you decide to take a trip up this way to drive Highway 12 yourself, which I do highly recommend. Suffice to say, we saw everything from towering, alien-looking crags of reddish rock that wouldn’t be out of place in Mordor to snow-blanketed forests right out of a Jack London novel. It was, there is no other word for it, breathtaking. The landscape would change dramatically every 15 or 20 minutes, and the cumulative result was almost as if you opened up one of those scenic nature calendars and teleported yourself to each of the diverse locations, one after the other.

We also encountered two of the coolest roads ever. One runs literally over the spine of a mountain, with sheer drops only a few feet to either side of road. Needless to say, we were both hugely impressed with whoever constructed it and hugely sympathetic toward the big-rig driver that was headed up towards it after we escaped with our lives. The other was a road that looked once to have been paved, but had long since stopped being maintained, leaving it to crumble into a series of gravel-strewn switchbacks crisscrossing back and forth down the side of a plateau. Neither of these are roads I’d care to try and navigate at night, but they were cool as hell in the middle of the day. But for the record, I’d drive both of them back to back while buzzed on a half-bottle of whiskey before I’d try to land on the two-lane road we saw that was, according to the sign, some suicidal idiot’s idea of a landing strip. If you’re trying to land a hover-converted DeLoreon, maybe…

And now here we are, chillin’ in Monument Valley. No, it doesn’t look like it does in the movies. They don’t do it justice.

When we woke on Monday we were in Las Vegas.

How did we get here? The best bet would be I-15, but there’s really no telling.

“There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a Benadryl binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (roughly paraphrased)

Los Angeles always makes me sick. I think I’m allergic to pretentiousness, or something. By the time we made our northwesterly escape late Sunday afternoon my sinuses were in full blown revolt.

My instincts told me to do a faceplant in the fluffy bed of our spacious poolside room at the Hard Rock Hotel, but hunger got the better of both of us and we went out for Italian food instead.

If you’re ever in Vegas, there’s no restaurant I can recommend more highly than Battista’s Hole in the Wall, a nifty place about a block off the strip that I first tried after being clued into its schmaltzy goodness by my old college roommate Neil.

Battista’s doesn’t have menus. They have a big sign on the wall listing their main dishes. At first you’d think the prices are a bit steep, but here’s the cool part: Every entree comes with garlic bread, salad or soup, dessert cappuccino, and BOTTOMLESS CARAFES OF RED AND WHITE WINE.

Yes, bottomless carafes of wine. It’s like the anti-IHOP. Sure, this stuff isn’t winning any awards from Robert Parker, but in case you didn’t understand me the first two times, IT’S ALL YOU CAN DRINK!

So we did. Who needs NyQuil when you can just enjoy a carafe or three of wine to put you right to sleep?

When we woke on Monday we were in Las Vegas.

Wait, I said that already, didn’t I?

Is this now day eight?

How many days has it been?

Las Vegas has a funny way of doing that to you.

Despite the copious amounts of all-natural sleep aid we’d imbibed, sleep was not an easy commodity to come by that night. The rooms immediately surrounding ours partied at excessive volumes until the wee-est … most wee? … whatever the superlative of “wee” is … hours and construction crews started jackhammering at the property next door at sunrise.

When we eventually gave up on our quest for shuteye, we packed up our stuff and loaded up on French Toast and blueberry pancakes.

We didn’t do much gambling. I put a few bucks on some ridiculously long shot bets in the sports book (I’ll win $15,000 if Sam Hornish wins the Cup) and then gave Dave a quick blackjack primer before we left the casinos up a few bucks.

Instead of wasting the rest of the afternoon wasting our money by the bucketful, we headed over to the Pinball Hall of Fame where we could waste it by the pocketful. There’s some seriously great nostalgia in that place. After we’d run through our stash of quarters, we got out of town while we were still ahead.

Next stop, Zion National Park.

There are no words to describe how beautiful this place is at sunset.

So I won’t try. Instead, look at the pictures. Like THIS ONE. Or THIS ONE. Or THIS ONE.

I’ll never understand why the Mormons have this in their backyard, but consider Missouri, of all places, to be Zion. Well, they’re welcome to it. I’ll trade them any day.

We ended Monday at some little pine log cabins just outside of Bryce Canyon National Park. In stark contrast to the night before, there was nowhere within 30 miles that was open for dinner so we ate PBJ from the cooler and it was so quiet that we heard maybe three cars pass by on the highway all night long.

It was divine.

Now we’re in Monument Valley, Utah. A recap of day nine’s travels will be coming after I’ve had a chance to download the photos.

Did I get enough numbers in the post title? Good.

In addition to Dave’s eloquent summary of our last few blog-free days, I wanted to jump in and provide a few details as well. I feel like we’ve been neglecting you, dear readers, and I’d really like to make up for our oversight.

So Dave mentioned our brief encounter with the Luftwaffe, right? (OK, check.)

And the overwhelmingly touristy-ness of Tombstone proper? (Cool.)

And that that the Arizona Highway Patrol is so serious about speed enforcement that they buzz the interstate with A-10s? No? He missed that part? Well, let me tell you, these guys mean business!

As Dave mentioned, the drive was otherwise fairly uneventful. We cruised into Yuma at 3:10 (Pacific Time, at least) and we got much more amusement out of that than even the geekiest of roadtrippers should. (Which is to say, really, any amusement.)

After downing a couple Double-Doubles at In-N-Out Burger and spending far too much time at the Yuma, Arizona post office, we got back on the road and put the hammer down as we were free of the jurisdiction of the Arizona Speed Nazis.

In California they don’t worry so much about speeding that they plant highway patrol cars at every other mile marker. In a clear showing of where their priorities lay, they instead perch Border Patrol paddy wagons at the top of every third sand dune.

Leaving any political commentary aside, at this point I was just happy that we could once again make good time. As Dave mentioned, we didn’t get to the Salton Sea in time for me to get any photos around sunset, but I did at least get one semi-nifty night time shot.

After that, it was a quick jaunt up through Coachella, past the numerous combined casino bowling alleys, up I-10 and into the sprawling smogscape of Los Angeles.

For me, the next two days were spent almost exclusively on the HMS Queen Mary, the legendary decommissioned (and supposedly haunted) cruise ship now permanently moored in Long Beach harbor, while Dave and his wife Meredith stayed up in Sherman Oaks and commuted down for the wedding events.

That’s right, the Queen Mary is reputed to be inhabited by the spirits of those who have died on board, or in its powerful wake. They give “Ghost Tours” and have signs posted at the locations of various “sightings” around the ship. Despite the fact that my room was no less than seven feet away from the nearest “sighting” sign, and that my room appeared to have been constructed by a funhouse architect, Jason is the only one of us to supposedly experience an encounter.

The night before his wedding, Jason lay wide awake in his bed, trying to convince a nasty head cold to let him get some much needed sleep. Then he says he felt a terrible chill as the temperature of the room dropped dramatically, and he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched — that he was not alone.

I’m pretty sure that feeling happens to EVERY guy right before he gets married. That’s just a hunch on my part. But Jason swears that he saw a shape or something, too. And saw it move. And maybe heard some noises.

Either way, the next day was jitter free, and the wedding went off without a hitch. I have to say, it was a fantastic wedding (even performed by the ship captain) and everyone had a swell time — complete with the most dramatic post-reception retelling of the Kennedale White Trash Wedding I’ve ever heard Jason perform.

Saturday Jason, his new wife Cynthia, and I checked out of the boat … hotel … boatel, and headed back towards Burbank to take the newlyweds home. We stopped off in Beverly Hills for a quick peek around the grounds of Greystone Mansion.

After dropping off the happy couple, I drove up to Studio City to meet back up with Dave, Mere, and Den, and to finally meet a couple more of Dave’s friends, Peter and Colleen (and Ian Ziering) for a lovely dinner of what Californians like to pretend is Mexican food. It was a nice (albeit loud) evening of writer-talk, and a fitting way to cap off the Los Angeles experience.

Now we’re headed over to meet back up with Jason one final time and try to pack two people’s worth of shit back into the car.

Next stop, Vegas.

So. Where were we?

Ah yes. Tombstone. Land of the Last-Resort Circle K.

Bo and I woke up Wednesday morning and decided to check out the OK Corral gunfight show, because damned if we were going to let our most lasting impression of the town be the teenage taquito-flinger from the night before. We packed up and headed out to our car, passing the huge maroon tour bus that had transported a contingent of the German Air Force to our hotel. Did we forget to mention the German Air Force? Apparently they were doing some sort of training exercise at the nearby air base, but their presence did cause me to note several things: 1) my high school and college German classes were woefully ineffective and 2) not a one of them were wearing those cool spiked metal helmets. Disappointing.

We showed up in downtown Tombstone, which is to say the part of Tombstone that isn’t a hotel, a little before noon, figuring the gunfight show would be at high noon, like any sensible gunfight show should be. Sadly, it wasn’t happening till two o’clock, and with all due respect to the good citizens of Tombstone, there’s no way we were hanging around that long.

Bo has some great shots from the town over on the flickr page, but they may not convey the full atmosphere of the place, which is this: imagine if the cheesy gunfight show at Six Flags were to grow like a cancer and envelop several blocks of real estate in the midst of otherwise unremarkable desert. The historic buildings are undercut by occasional bits of anachronism such as signs warning away any potential rollerbladers stupid enough to attempt rollerblading on gravel roads and wooden-plank walkways. Costumed re-enactors assail passersby every three feet, trying to talk you out of your money and into whichever wild west show they happen to be shilling for. After walking the length of main street, we’d had enough, and we headed out.

Most of Wednesday was spent in the car, traveling through Arizona and on into Cali along the border. The most notable moment aside from the many, many police officers was our late lunch at In-N-Out Burger, which was really only memorable because it was the closest we’d gotten to real food since the glorious Monday-night pizza. The highway blazed a path through rolling sand dunes around sundown, which made for some scenic farfegnugen, but as the sun began dropping closer to the horizon, Bo began to suspect that our goal of reaching the Salton Sea in time to photograph its alien landscape might not be realized. Sure enough, we didn’t reach the Sea until well after dark, so Bo’s valiant photographic efforts were hampered by the fact that the surroundings looked like a dark blur with a shiny blur in the middle. Nor was there any sign of Val Kilmer.

We finally arrived at our Burbank Holiday Inn around 10:30, and were pleasantly surprised when the staff upgraded us to a suite in the “executive tower.” The surprise was slightly less pleasant when we noticed that our spacious suite sported only one bed, but I didn’t mind taking the fold-out couch-bed, so we didn’t make an issue of it. My good friend Den came over bearing booze, allowing him and Bo to confirm each other’s long-disputed existences, and much fun was had.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday saw the arrival of my lovely wife Mere via plane, our nights occupied by Jason Davis’ rehearsal dinner and wedding, and general hanging about with LA friends. Some highlights:

- Jason’s mom almost murdered a hunchbacked piano player at the rehearsal dinner restaurant, right around the time his neverending set moved into a cover of the Peanuts theme song.

- Bo nearly lost his camera over the side of the Queen Mary when they sounded the foghorn unexpectedly as he leaned out over the railing to get a shot.

- Bo got a room located as far forward into the bow of the ship as you could get and not be on deck. The entire room was on a steep grade, and may in fact have been designed by the same people responsible for the defunct Six Flags exhibit “Casa Magnetica.”

- Jason saw a ghost in his honeymoon suite. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just his own pale reflection in the mirror.

- Jason staged a dramatic monologue recounting of The Ballad of The Kennedale White Trash Wedding on the deck of the Queen Mary. It’s a woeful tale of rednecks, genital warts, and women named Mike, but I could never do it justice. But if you ever meet Jason, be sure to ask him to tell the story.

- Den, Mere and I met this guy in a Studio City Starbucks. He was wearing a ball cap with a name tag attached, reading “A. Nobody C.I.A.” When first noticed, he was dictating loudly into a handheld recorder, delivering a monologue to whatever audience he imagines in his strange, fevered brain, and concluding with the line, “If anyone talks bad about my networks, I will sue them for one billion dollars!” A few minutes later when Den was trying to take a picture of Mere, Mr. Nobody interrupted and said, “Take a picture of this!” He then unfolded a five-foot-wide banner version of his business card. Clearly, his many, many networks spare no expense when it comes to promotion. He interacted with us several more times before we left, most notably when he offered to promote any of our future movie projects on his many, many networks. Did we mention he has many, many networks?

- We saw Beverly Hills 90210’s Ian Ziering in Mexicali on Ventura. He looks more or less exactly the same as he did in the mid-90s, except slightly less employed. Seriously, we couldn’t get Brian Austen Green? At least then we could have asked him what it’s like to sleep with Megan Fox…

That’s all for now. This afternoon Mere boards a plane for home and Bo and I hit the road bound for Vegas. Stay tuned…

Apparently a few people were having problems with the login for the comments. We’ve now set it where you don’t have to sign in, so feel free to leave us a note now that you can.

Marfa is a wonderfully funky town. Darned friendly, too. I woke up yesterday morning, got showered and walked down to the post office to mail something for work. Everyone I passed on the street or in the post office smiled, said “Good morning!” and you could tell they actually believed it. (Try to find smiling people in a big city post office. I dare you.)

Of course, they were right. It was a good morning. It was about 50^oF, the sun was shining, the sky was clear, and all seemed right with the world. The plan was to hit a local cafe for breakfast, then head north to New Mexico.

Sadly, the cafe was closed this morning. (It appears they may only be open on weekends.) So instead we stocked up on cinnamon rolls when we filled up for gas and got on the road, listening to the whimsical sounds of Marfa Public Radio until we crossed over the Wild Rose Pass and lost the signal on the other side of the mountains.

Unlike most of the scenically named places in western Texas, the Wild Rose Pass is not ironic. There actually are wild roses that bloom along the mountainsides. This being February, they aren’t blooming right now, but that doesn’t detract from the view one bit.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the flat dirt north of the Davis Mountains. Sure, it’s a step up from Midland-Odessa, but it’s still about as scenic as a truck stop restroom. (And certainly less interesting.)

When you drive through Balmorhea and see the highway department’s “Keep Balmorhea Beautiful” sign, you wonder if the individual responsible for the sign has ever been to Balmorhea before. Actually, strike that. You damn well know they haven’t. It would be cruel to even propose that sign as a joke.

As an aside, I didn’t know that Balmorhea was a town. I only knew it as the unfortunate digestive condition brought about by too much direct contact with Microsoft executives.

From there, we continued on through Pecos, another town most remarkable for its unremarkableness.

A note to road weary travelers: The Pecos Melon Company is named literally. Though it looks kind of seedy, that building is not a strip club, so don’t bother stopping. You will only be disappointed. (Unless you really like cantaloupe.)

Another note of observation: The largest building in Pecos (that we saw) is the funeral home. Take from that what you will.

North of Pecos there are historical markers nearly every mile until you reach the New Mexico border. We have concluded that erecting historical markers must be the hobby of choice for the few inhabitants of this sparse landscape, because you can cheaply make them out of rocks and there really isn’t anything else to do around here. The problem is that quite frankly NOTHING of any historical import has happened here. Or a mile down the road. Or 3/4 mile past that, either.

Take Orla, for example. No seriously, take it. Nobody wants it. Even the guy who built this gas station and cafe at these crossroads has no interest. He shut them down and moved 1/4 mile down the road to be closer to the highway in 1931. That’s what passes for historical around here.

A few miles north of Orla we passed into the “Land of Enchantment.” Nothing really changes except the quality of the road, so you know the state’s slogan either describes other parts of New Mexico, or the reason peyote was so popular with the original inhabitants of this land.

The next not-completely-insiginifcant town on the map was Carlsbad, home of the famously deep damp hole in the ground. Most travelers would stop and take a peek inside, but Dave and I have been there before, so we kept the hammer down so we could have a little more time to investigate…

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO???

The International UFO Museum and Research Center is everything you might expect from just such a museum. There are enlarged newspaper clippings, blurry photographs of sightings, more newspaper clippings, photographs of blurry sightings, more newspaper clippings, and quite a few blurry photographs of blurry sightings. And a few newspaper clippings, too. There’s also a wax dummy used in the movie Roswell, and a rubber alien contained in a flimsy plastic “containment unit” in the corner. David signed the guestbook as “Fox Mulder” as he said, “just in case the government is snooping around.” (It’s a good thing they can’t find this blog…)

But seriously, this is important stuff! A presidential candidate said so!

Also, this made us giggle uncontrollably for about 10 minutes.

With that (mostly) out of our system, we headed for the main attraction at this place — the gift shop. We grabbed a tchotchke or two for ourselves (even something for Norm) and headed to the Cover-Up Cafe for lunch.

As it turns out, yesterday was just a bad day for food. Our culinary karma must’ve been seriously depleted by finding the best damn pizza on the planet the day before. The Cover-Up Cafe looked like it had been closed for about a year. Plan B was to again find a picnic area and fill up on sandwiches from the cooler.

So we got back on the road and wound up in Lincoln, New Mexico - the town that made Billy the Kid famous. There’s an old fortification, a church, a general store, a post office, and a little amphitheater where they re-enact Billy the Kid’s escape from the town, yet Lincoln doesn’t even show up on Google Maps.

Smokey the Bear National Monument DOES show up in Bo’s GPS, though. Seriously, the “monument” is a plywood cutout of Smokey the Bear on the side of the road. The Washington Monument took 36 years to build. I’d be shocked if this took 38 minutes. Let us also not mention the wisdom or irony of erecting a sheet of plywood in the middle of an area prone to wildfires to honor something intended to save trees.

After a quick photo with the bear we got back in the car and wound our way through Capitan and Ruidoso before riding off into the sunset past White Sands. We drove on into the night so we could eventually stop in Tombstone, Arizona for the night.

Supposedly there’s some corral around here we’re supposed to see, but our first impression of this town is rather bleak. Our bad culinary karma continued, as there’s no food for 30 miles past 10pm. The only business open that late is the Circle K, and they don’t even have enough town pride to stock the pizza that made their city famous. We haven’t seen any gunfights yet, but we did witness a food fight between the night shift workers who found the taquitos from the hot roller to be fantastic ammunition. We barely made it out of there with our chocolate milk and Cheeze-Its. Strange things were afoot at the Circle K.

Now, let’s see about that corral….

As day one of our foray westward winds down, I’m typing these words from the lobby of the historic Hotel Paisano in Marfa, Texas. Some things Marfa’s known for, even if you don’t know Marfa:

- According to IMDb, movies including Giant, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood have all shot here. We haven’t spotted Daniel Day Lewis hanging around town yet, but…hey! Who the hell drank my milkshake?

- Marfa is the setting for Michael Chiappetta’s novel Journey into Darkness. No, I haven’t heard of him or the novel either, but I needed another bullet point to flush out this list, and that’s the best wikipedia could come up with.

- The so-called “Marfa mystery lights” are visible from outside of town (more on that in a minute)

- A small, humble-looking restaurant named “Pizza Foundation” serves what may in fact be the best pizza I have ever consumed. Possibly even the best pizza ever made. Rumors here around town suggest that the pizza actually falls from the sky at dawn every morning, after which it is gathered by a consecrated priesthood of illegal day workers and stored on the alabaster thighs of vestal virgins until ready to be served.

It started out as an absolutely perfect day to hit the road, with weather back home mostly clear, cool, and beautiful. Problems of exploding water heaters and mystery omen pups aside, the day was bright and full of promise.

By the time we stopped for lunch at an anonymous roadside picnic area, a fell wind had begun to blow. I call it that, because it was very strong, and I almost fell over. But honestly, this was the sort of wind that is usually accompanied by a low-man-on-the-totem-pole TV reporter and footage of flattened mobile homes. Or at least a cutaway to that cow from Twister. This wind, I shit you not, dried our sandwich bread from pleasantly fresh to crunchy as we ate. It was actually pretty impressive. Two other things of note from the lunch stop:

- Apparently Uncle Jesse is alive and well and driving a motor home across the country in his golden years. (No, you idiot, this Uncle Jesse, not that one.)

- It’s illegal to get an erection at Texas roadside picnic stops. Seriously, they have signs that say they can charge you fines between $1 and $200. You can’t have an erection and you can’t pitch a tent. But you can sport wood. After you’ve gathered it. For your campfire. Why are you looking at me like that?

As we headed further into the flat, brown, petrol-stink wasteland that is west Texas, the wind was kicking up dust storms so thick that the view through the front windshield looked like we’d wandered into Stephen King’s The Mist if it had been filmed with the color palate of O Brother Where Art Thou. We spent the better part of the day driving through my home state’s dandruff, which was just as well, because it obscured our view of the scenery, of which there wasn’t any. Thankfully once we got nearer Marfa, the dust began to clear, the terrain began to roll, the sun began to set, and Bo began to dangle himself out the window at 95 miles per hour so he could get shots like this one.

Finally, we rolled into town around 7:30 or so, checked in, and walked down the street for a few slices of God’s Only Beloved Pizza. With full bellies and surging cholesterol, we loaded up Bo’s camera equipment and set out to get our Mulder and Scully on (I’m not saying which of us is which, but Bo does look very fetching in a pantsuit) by investigating the Marfa Lights.

First of all: even if the marvelous mysterious Marfa lights had done a no-show, or had proven to be obviously something mundane such as distant traffic or a family of industrious hillbillies with halogen lights strapped to their low, sloping foreheads, the view directly upward was well worth 20 minutes of ear-blistering cold wind at the official Marfa-light viewing platform off Highway 67. The stars at night are indeed big and bright (clap clap clap clap) deep in the heart of Texas, and it’s easy for an ostensible city dweller to forget just how bloody fantastic the night sky looks once you get away from all the assholes who need lights for selfish bullshit like seeing and reading and performing open-heart surgery. Stars kick ass, is what I’m saying here.

But: Marfa lights, right? What happened? Did we see the mothership? Swamp gas? Ball lightning? Well, I’ll just go ahead and admit that I spent at least two minutes squinting like a jackass at three quite stationary lights in the distance, muttering things like, “I think that one moved to the right a little,” and “Does that one look like it’s flickering more than the others to you?” before deciding that, ah, those were distant building lights, I’ve been looking in the wrong direction, and I’m a stupid asshat.

Which was all the more obvious when I turned 45 degrees to the right and HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THAT! I’ll be durned. I went in skeptical and prepared to be thoroughly unimpressed, but damned if those crazy old Marfa lights didn’t show up right on schedule and put on quite a show. I’m frankly stumped as far as theories, so I’ll just describe what we saw.

Over the course of 20 or so minutes, we saw between 1-3 glowing, apparently spherical lights in the distance out over the desert. Their orientation, movement, and behavior discounts, at least in my thinking, that they were faraway car lights. There was a tall broadcast tower or something similar in the same area of the horizon, marked by three blinking red lights. This is only important because it gave us a stationary object by which to gauge the Marfa lights’ movements. And move they did. They drifted slowly with no apparent pattern, occasionally jerking with sudden, unpredictable hops across the sky that seems to discount aircraft, because unless we really are reverse engineering alien technology (and Indiana Jones wouldn’t lie to us), any plane that tried these maneuvers would come apart like this windmill. The glowing spheres would disappear and reappear, sometimes just blinking out, sometimes appearing to vanish behind a hill, leaving a faint coronal aura like you get when an unseen car’s headlights are approaching you from the other side of a hill. But other times they would dip along that same path and not vanish behind what may or may not have been an unseen hill (it was bloody dark out there, so the horizon was pretty much impossible to make out). They changed color frequently, and sometimes seemed to split into 2-3 smaller spheres before rejoining into one.

And that’s about it. They were still dancing on the horizon when we packed up and headed back to the hotel, and we could see them, now that we knew where to look, pretty much the whole drive back into town. Conclusions? Beats the hell outta me. My theorizing in this regard is about as limited as it was with the UFO Jason and I spotted in the New Mexico desert years ago (on yet another road trip out to LA…hmm…). I don’t have the foggiest what it was. I saw it, it didn’t move like aircraft, and it was unnerving. It, like the Marfa lights, remains a mystery, something inexplicable, or perhaps only explicable to smarter chaps than I. As for me, I like a little mystery in the world.

We’re headed out the door momentarily. Dave’s going to pick me up any moment to go get the rental car.  But I wanted to let you know that we have started the trip off right. And to tell you why I’m thankful for Sony Betamax.

You see, when our friend Jason moved to California a few years ago he didn’t have room for all of his stuff in the U-Haul trailer, nor in his tiny apartment, which I believe was actually smaller than the U-Haul trailer itself. So Jason divested himself of a few of his “prized” collections, like the 800-pound commercial grade Betamax VCR he inherited from a previous job.

Back in the 80s and 90s it had a long useful life serving up advertisements for a local university TV station before it was decommissioned. Jason, like the electronics vulture that he is, snatched it up, because you never know when you’ll need to watch a Pepto Bismol commercial from 1984 or a Public Service Announcement from 1991 reminding you of the dangers of undercooked pork.

Anyway, I was the lucky recipient of this enormous piece of antiquated hardware. Since it was bequeathed to me, it has been sitting in the storage closet in my garage, until early this morning when I went to retrieve it from its own Purgatory.
You see, the plan is to pack it in the trunk and take it with us to California so it may be reunited with its rightful owner. For me, this thing’s just been a damned albatross around my neck. (And quite frankly, I think it weighs more than any albatross I’ve ever seen.)

But today, I am grateful for that junkpile I wouldn’t even use as a boat anchor. When I went to pull it out of the closet to pack it up I noticed that the garage floor was wet — apparently my hot water heater which also resides in that storage closet was leaking. Had it not been for that piece of crap VCR, I never would have noticed, and it would have continued to leak (and perhaps given out completely) while I was gone.

So thank God and Sony Betamax for some rather inconvenient, yet fortunate timing!

The water heater is now drained, and my dad is going to take care of it while I’m gone. (I have the world’s best dad.)

And Jason, you can breathe a sigh of relief — the VCR was sitting on the top of a pile of boxes. It’s perfectly dry.