West Texas

I wonder what M would have said if I'd told her her surprise trip would be to Los Angeles and West Texas? I guess its a good thing I didn't tell her where we were going ahead of time.

Carlsbad was the farthest point on our big 48-hour loop southeast from Albuquerque. But in order to complete our clockwise loop, we needed to head west towards Las Cruces before heading north again. And that meant Texas for a few hours. And El Paso. I had long since decided against the side trip into Juarez!

This drive is pretty desolate, but there's a neat section that skirts the south end of the Guadalupe Mountains and El Capitan.  The part of me that collects obscure state high points would have loved to hike up Guadalupe Peak (the highest point in Texas), but this was not the trip for it. Maybe the next time I'm passing through!

Carlsbad Caverns

If M had figured we were headed for Carlsbad, she didn't let on. She was reading Nora Roberts when we passed all the billboards for White's City and the Caves.

I looked for Schlumberger trucks as we drove south from Artesia (I spent the fall of 1981 in Midland, a couple hours away, in well logging school) but the closest I came was a whole bunch of oil wells and a convoy of Halliburton frac trucks warming up outside of town.

I had been concerned that we would arrive at the Caverns too late and have to give up one of the tour options since we had to be on the road by mid-afternoon to our next stop, but it all worked out fine. We spent more than 3 hours underground, exploring the Big Room on our own and then taking a guided tour of some other parts of the cave. Carlsbad's sheer scale, and the abundance of pointy-up and pointy-down things, more than made up for our jaded whining about some of the other less than adequate caves we've visited in the last few years!

I don't normally attach this many photos to a post, but I guess there's really no reason not to! Photography is a little shaky in the low lighting, but it's amazing how many came out okay (well, its also amazing how many I actually took in order to get a few that worked).

Cloudcroft

The location was good given our drive from Albuquerque to Carlsbad (remember, M doesn't know where we're going), it looked like it had a lot more character than a chain motel in Alamogordo, and it was in the mountains, which offered a little more interest than the desert.  But I wasn't sure what to expect. I worried that it was over-hyped and overpriced. Or that it was a snooty country club for the high rollers in Alamogordo. It may have been a bit of these things, but it was actually a nice place to stay and my biggest regret was that we got in late and had to leave early.

It's old - Conrad Hilton once ran it.  And it does have character.  And it has a ghost - named Rebecca - after whom they named the restaurant.  We ate late - at least for us. Michele had a stuffed Poblano (they were out of the blackened trout) and I had a very good steak. Their specialty appeared to be flambeed desserts, but we passed on the Bananas Foster and Cherry Jubilee. We still went to bed on full stomachs since I had warned M we needed to get an early start.

The next morning we headed east - toward Roswell and Lubbock - or at least in that direction  Now that would have been a real surprise!

White Sands

 

I had seen something that said that White Sands closed at 6PM and we pulled into the visitor's center at 5:45.  It turns out that while the visitor's center closes at 6, the drive through the dunes does not, so we joined a line of cars and RVs and spent 45 minutes exploring a really amazing landscape.

White Sands is a large dune field built from gypsum sand blowing off a dry lake bed farther west. I expected the white dunes, but I didn't expect the roadways and parking lots that looked like the snow plow had just been through.  The late afternoon light and the temperature were perfect. I called Rebecca's to say we'd be a little late for dinner.

Alamogordo

I had fretted a lot about our schedule today and tomorrow (Saturday and Sunday). There would be much driving amid constraints that I feared would cause use to forego some fun opportunities.

Driving through central and southern New Mexico has a certain appeal (to me), but the reason for doing it was to see some stuff we might not get a chance to see again.  Like White Sands, which I wanted to visit, but which I thought M might enjoy, too.

We didn't have time to visit the Three Rivers Petroglyph site (I hadn't really expected to), but we did stop briefly at the big Pistachio in front of McGinns - on a surprise trip, you have to be willing to settle for surprises of all sorts.  We left with a bag of Pistachio Brittle and raced off for Alamogordo and White Sands.

Gran Quivara

We picked up sandwiches to go at The Grove in Albuquerque and drove out of town, heading east. Amarillo! Now that would have been a real surprise trip! But we turned south. M was remarkably content not to try to diagnose our route or possible destination.

We had our lunch at a picnic table at Quarai, one of the Salinas Pueblos, but we didn't explore. We did stop 30 minutes later at Gran Quivara and walked around the ruins, before continuing our mysterious trip southward.

These old stone structures seem to capture the 17th century cultural overlap that marks so much of the southwest - between long-existing pueblo cultures and newly arrived Spanish missionaries. The Franciscans built churches within the pueblos and, at least for awhile, appeared to have tolerated or allowed the native people to continue their own spiritual practices. For a while.

Southwest Chief

We waited on the platform as the train backed in and then found our way to our roomette and deposited our gear. We hung out on the platform taking pictures as long as we could. I thought about trying to recreate the 1963 picture of me in front of the locomotive of the Super Chief in pretty much the same location, but couldn't figure out how to do it. This was due to lighting and difficulty of getting near the engines, but it was also because I doubted we could find anyone willing (or strong enough) to hold me up to the engineer's cab.

The train pulled out on time, winding south along the bucolic Los Angeles River, then cutting cross country through desert scrub and orange groves towards Fullerton (this is supposed to funny!). We were in the dining car at dusk while passing through Riverside and were back to our car when the train pulled into San Bernardino (nice station).  We watched the long line of semis climbing the grade towards Cajon Pass and then watched their lights stretching into the desert to the north.

We climbed into bed somewhere in the Mojave Desert east of Barstow. And slept through much of Arizona.  I woke for some really rough track near Kingman and again when we stopped at 5AM in Flagstaff.  The sun rose over the painted desert east of Winslow and we had breakfast passing through Gallup NM. We pulled into Albuquerque a little early and found a cab to take us to the Hertz lot at ABQ.

It would have been nice to stay on the train to Chicago - maybe next time!

Union Station

The timing of returning the car to Union Station was tricky. I didn't want to get stuck in traffic and not get the car back in time. But I also didn't want to get back too quickly, since that would make it harder to pull off the surprise. I had hoped to return the car, then convey the impression that we were going to take the bus back to LAX and fly somewhere, but on the way across to the buses, we would just turn up the ramp to the platform where our sleeping car would be waiting.

But that just didn't work. We returned the car with no problem, but then had to hang out in the waiting area before our train was ready -- and at that point the fact that we were taking a train was sort of hard to disguise!  I told M she could go up to the departures board and figure out what train we were on, but she was happy not knowing.  It was still a surprise - and one I could tell M really was excited about - but not quite the one I had tried to picture.

Union Station is big and bustling and feels like a train station should.  Many different rail and bus systems come together here, so there's always activity. The station has been nicely renovated with grand open spaces, original architectural details, and plenty of commercial activity.

Griffith Park

It was much more crowded on top than I had expected, but we managed to find parking without having to hoof it up the road from below. On the other hand the view was exactly the sort of hazy view that I expected.  You could imagine that there was an ocean out there beyond the fuzzy outlines of the Beverley Hills to the west and if you looked carefully, you could see the higher peaks of the San Gabriels on the skyline to the northeast.  I'd love to see this on a really clear day - I assume that happens sometimes?