Burning Gas-Santa Fe

Posted on 23/08/2012 by Grumpa Joe

During my lifetime I have traveled a lot. My goal is to visit as many places in the United States and Canada as I can before my travel days end. Lately though, I find myself re-visiting places I have been to before. When I plan a trip, I try to include new cities, and new routes, but there is always someplace that I really enjoyed that is near the new place. My last post in the Burning Gas travel series took us to the White Sands National Monument near  Alamogordo, New Mexico. That put us within one driving day from Santa Fé, New Mexico. I love Santa Fé. My family camped there on a visit some forty years ago. We fell in love with the tiny hamlet of Santa Fé. Established in 1608 it rivals Saint Augustine Florida for the title of the oldest city in North America. What I found when I returned with Peggy was not a three hundred year old village, but a three hundred year old village surrounded by urban sprawl. Immediately my mind played back the lines from John Steinbeck’s novel Travels With Charley,

“Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”  

Oh how true that is. We stayed in a modern hotel, on a six lane median separated street five miles from the center of the old town. Every intersection has another shopping center with Home Depot, Staples, Kohl’s, Appleby’s, and other national chain stores. Laced in between were the more homey Spanish-Mexican-American food places which I so longed to try, but couldn’t because Miss Peggy cannot handle those spicy foods.

On our first  trip, I recall seeing the new and modern State Capital building on the outskirts of town.  This time I had to find it with the GPS. It is surrounded by business and sub-divisions near the center of town.

When we finally did find Old Santa Fé it remained the same, except for the amount of vehicular traffic streaming through the old town. The Veranda of the Governor’s Palace is still the market place for native Americans selling their handcrafted jewelry. The Basilica is still at the end of San Francisco Street. The town square is still a hangout for hippies. Except now the hippies are forty years older and sport long white hair and beards. Artists abound selling small twenty-dollar pieces to the tourists. The shops around the square teem with more elegant artwork and clothing that one can only find in Santa Fé.

We visited the oldest house in America on De Vargas Street off the Old Santa Fé Trail, and across from the Mission San Miguel.  San Miguel (est 1610) is one of the oldest missions in North America, and  is still an active parish. A short stroll from the Mission we entered the Loretto Chapel. This church is modeled after Notre Dame in Paris, however it is much smaller. The architect forgot to build a staircase to the choir loft. The good nuns who served the church prayed to Saint Joseph the builder for a solution. A stranger showed up and built a magnificent spiral staircase to the choir, and then left. No one knows who he was nor from where he came, nor where he got the wood. The church implies it as a miracle, but will not declare it so.

A few blocks away we entered the vestibule of the Basilica Saint Francis Assisi to find a funeral mass in progress, so we decided to call it a day.

We also visited the Georgia O’Keefe museum to learn about the artist behind the print of the huge red poppy hanging on our wall at home. It turns out she invented the concept of painting  flowers close up and big. She spent much of her life on a ranch near the museum painting desert scenes in solitude.

Before we left Santa Fé, we formed a new bond and  now have a second benchmark to which we can never return.

 

 

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Burning Gas-White Sands

Posted on 31/07/2012 by Grumpa Joe

In 1945 I remember seeing a full-page photo on the cover of the Chicago Times. It showed a giant mushroom cloud. The photo was of the first atom bomb explosion released by Uncle to the public. Ever since then, I have had a secret wish to visit the site where they tested the first A-bomb. I learned on an earlier trip to New Mexico that a group of physicists designed and built the bomb at a place called Los Alamos. The government built the lab as a top-secret project under the code name “Manhattan Project.” Under that moniker, Uncle secretly bought thousands of acres of land in New Mexico for building the atomic bomb.

There are volumes of books written about the development, and one can visit the Los Alamos Lab to see real life-size models of Fat Boy and Little Man, the two bombs they developed and eventually dropped on Hiroshima and  Nagasaki, Japan.

The first tests took place on a site two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, in the White Sand desert. It became a missile test site and remains so today.

Our visit to Alamogordo, New Mexico was to see the White Sands National Monument. White Sands Monument is not where the bomb first blew up, but is directly south of it by about a hundred miles. The terrain and the color of the sand is the same in both places.

We approached the monument from Alamogordo on highway US 70 and passed by Holloman Air Force base on the way. I read that this road is sometimes closed when Uncle tests missiles. I guess blowing up civilians passing through on the way to work is a possibility. Sure enough, I saw a sign along the way warning that road closures occur during missile tests. I also read that one should visit the monument in the evening at sunset to get the greatest visual impact. We did that. Seeing the sun set over these magnificently white sand dunes was spectacular. A line of cars clogged the gate. There were hundreds of people coming to watch the show. Many visitors, we learned, came to  picnic at one of the many shaded tables provided

It is hard to describe the beauty of the place. The road reminded me of driving in winter when there is deep snow and it is blowing and drifting all around. The difference being that we had the air conditioner set at seventy degrees in evening air that was still ninety degrees. Peggy and I stopped at several spots and got out to walk around. She was not up to dune climbing. I didn’t think the dunes were as high or as tough as the Sleeping Bear Dune in Michigan, but we enjoyed the views from the road. The sun was down and the light began getting dim, yet not many people were leaving.

The following morning we revisited the Monument to get the feel of bright sun, heat, and the whiteness. The many people of last evening were gone, and the dunes seemed lonely. My point and shoot camera with the digital display was useless in the brightness. I was literally pointing and shooting to take pictures without seeing what I had framed. Peggy stayed in the car because the heat was too intense as was the sun. The whiteness of the sand hurt my eyes even while wearing polarized sun glasses.

Later that evening, I discovered that Peggy had mistakenly double medicated herself in the morning and was not very much into the experience. Thank God I was not aware of it during the day.

We stayed for a couple of hours, I left the car running with the air for Peggy, and took photos from many points of interest, they all looked the same, white. I actually left the car in some of the pictures just to give some perspective. As we left, we made one more stop  and toured the visitors center.

The miles driven, and the gas burned to see White Sands Monument was well worth it. I rationalized that I was close enough to the A-bomb test sight to satisfy my secret wish and we left town by another route.

The story will continue.

In the meantime, please enjoy the photos.

White Sands National Monument at Sunset

White clouds, white sand dune, white road, brown grass

People Walking the Dunes

A Solitary Yucca Growing in the Morning Sun

Only the Strong Survive

The plant establishes a root system that digs deep. Then the wind removes the sand from around the roots leaving a cylinder of white sand as a post on which the plant lives.

Blue on White

A sand drifted road plowed, and looking like mid-western snow.

The Avalon Death Star in Blizzard White against White Sands.

A picnic area in the heat of the morning sun. The night before the tables were all filled with people.

A hardy stand of Yucca.

The White Sands National Monument Visitors Center with ocotillo just beginning to bloom.

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