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July 1, 2008
Going Places
Taking a road trip around the Southwest was one of the best things I've decided to do in a really long time. You never know what you're going to run into when you don't have a real plan. Obi (my boyfriend) and I decided to take a couple of weeks to check some places out. We took off on Route 50 - "The Loneliest Road in America" - Hall sold me on it when he started to tell me about some of the creepy old towns along the way where there are haunted hotels. I really like scary old things. Early on in our journey, I discovered something very interesting. The "world-famous" Bunny Ranch (and Bunny Ranch 2) is along Route 50 in Nevada...
I bet there are plenty of scary old things there, but I didn't really want to check it out.
Driving along, I saw what I thought was a tree covered in bats (the flying mammal)...
Nope...just a bunch of old shoes.
Checked out Arches and a lot of other things in between...
but what I couldn't wait for was Colorado!
On the road to Telluride! I'm pretty thrilled at this point - I went to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder, so it's fun for me to visit some places I haven't been to in a long while. There's nothing like being plopped in the middle of Colorado's Fourteeners (I guess there's something like 54 mountains above 14,000 feet in Colorado!). We didn't see Tom Cruise or Katie Holmes...I think they were hiding out in their fortress with Xenu or something. There are a ton of obnoxiously huge homes (and they're building lots more) - it's not the old mining town that it once was. You could barely pay people to live in Telluride in the 60's. It was gorgeous, there was no work, and the cost of living was low - so it was a natural place for hippie-types to flock. Those days are long gone. There's no end to the natural beauty, though...you can't see in this photograph, but there are a bunch of elk to the right.
Onward we went to the land of pinon, juniper...
jackalope - they're all over the place (just kidding...this is Obi - not on our trip, but in South Dakota...I had to throw this one in here)...
...and big, beautiful skies...
New Mexico! Madrid, New Mexico (you don't say it like the city in Spain, or people will look at you funny). Madrid is a funky little unincorporated village (no law). It just so happens that my great-grandmother ran a restaurant and boarding house right on the main drag in the 30's - it's a turquoise shop now. Speaking of turquoise - this area is the home of Cerrillos turquoise...I've never seen anything like it (75 colors have been identified in this paricular type of turquoise). The Cerrillos mine is right up the way and is the oldest mine of any kind in the United States! People have been mining here for thousands of years. Tiffany and Company mined a lot of turquoise from the area in the late-19th century - it's where their signature "Tiffany blue" came from.
Madrid is also home to the Mine Shaft Tavern - "one of the last great roadhouses". There's usually live music happening and it seems like an extension of everyone's living room. We ended up getting ourselves invited to a huge party at an old schoolhouse - all of Madrid was there (all 300 of them). I was thankful that everyone was so accepting, as I think it was my turn...
After 2 weeks of sleeping under the stars (except for the nights when it snowed), we had to haul on home (our second to last night was spent in Bisbee, Arizona...I'm not going to talk about it in this entry since it was such a great town that it deserves its own entry). We spent our final night in Joshua Tree National Park...
I'm embarrassed to say that I had never been there before. I loved those crazy Dr. Seussian trees! Obi and I look strange...I think it's because we had been driving for too long. All of it was fabulous...
Posted by alli in Fun places to go
