Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 10, Mile 2229: To Roswell and...Beyond!

The museum at the Very Large Array near Socorro was temporarily closed, but luckily the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell was open.

The famous supposed UFO crash took place a few miles north of Roswell in July,1947--75 years ago! 

If you don't quite remember the story, here's Britannica spoiling all the fun.

So, of course, we had to check it out.

The museum combines a pretty accurate account and timeline of the incident and the fallout afterward with some magnificently cheesy exhibits of a crashed saucer and alien visitors.

These two could really use a ride home.

I guess this is the rescue party that came too late.

There was also memorabilia from many of the movies and stories about alien visitors.

"Gort, Klaatu barada nikto!"

I especially liked this illustration from the original serialization of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds showing a Martian tripod attacking a British dreadnought.

Of course there was an alien autopsy diorama.

Complete with a Man in Black carrying a tray of UFO parts.

There were several exhibits covering various other famous UFO sightings, encounters with aliens, and alien abductions. They didn't have anything on one that I remember well from a childhood steeped in UFO lore: the 1951 sighting known as the Lubbock lights. Click the link for a short, but interesting History Channel video. Since we were on our way to Lubbock, I was disappointed.

We wanted one last hit of New Mexican food before crossing into Texas, so we found a little cafe on our way out of town.

Excellent green chile stew.

Good chile rellenos.

And because sometimes you just need a fluffy piece (or two) of fried dough--sopapillas with honey.

If the aliens return for their 75th anniversary this July, they'll find way better food than on their last visit.

We found this wonderful Latin American tapas restaurant in Lubbock. Not terribly prepossessing from the outside.

But look at this menu:

The aquatic theme (sirena means mermaid) is continued inside.

O had a blood orange margarita with hibiscus syrup, while I sipped a smoky pechuga mezcal. We shared the pork belly empanadas and short rib posole. Both were stellar, as was the bourbon/orange flan we had for dessert.

The quality and diversity of restaurants available even in smaller towns these days is remarkable. When I traveled cross country in 1978 the food culture that makes restaurants like this possible simply didn't exist. Now places like this are everywhere. And they're packed.

We live in interesting times.

P.

Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 9, Mile 1858: Why Did the Elk Cross the Road?.

Outside of Phoenix we ventured into new territories, parts of Arizona and New Mexico neither of us have ever seen before.

This is the way a road trip should be: unexplored vistas, roads that stretch into your imagination.

We drove through many different landscapes, from flat desert to mountain forests and everything in between.

There are vast plains spiked with thousands of saguaro.

The wildflowers were in full bloom.

The palo verdes were glowing with bright yellow flowers.

This time of year the desert is almost green, with foliage sprouting from the most unlikely spots.

The high plains of New Mexico: pale grasses and rosy soil under a serene cloudscape of deep blue and brilliant white.

So why did the elk cross the road?

Because we stopped the car to take their picture and they got spooked.

Just northwest of Socorro on the Plains of San Agustin, we came across the Very Large Array. The VLA is a Y-shaped configuration of 27 82-foot radio dishes. Together they deliver the effective resolution of a single radio telescope 22 miles wide.

The location in a valley shielded from radio interference on all sides in the low humidity of New Mexico at almost 7,000 feet makes possible an unprecedented range of observations of distant galaxies.

The dishes are mounted on tracks so they can be repositioned as needed.

We finished the day in Socorro. Not really a happening burg, but convenient to our needs.

P.

Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 8, Mile 1476: By the Time We Get to Phoenix.

Leaving Escondido, we headed south to Interstate 8, then east through the  wonderful, chaotic jumble of boulders that is Anza-Borrego.

Anza-Borrego is the largest state park in California. The borregos, also known as desert bighorn sheep, thrive in this seemingly harsh environment. Or so they claim. In the many times we've been here, we've never seen one. 

The nearly six-hour drive to Phoenix was uneventful. We stopped at In-N-Out in Yuma for lunch, and arrived at our Air B&B in Phoenix around 4:30. We have a weekly Thursday Zoom with our friends, the Pereiras and the Sterns, so we joined the call and had a good catchup.

O has a friend in Phoenix that she met at a Native American flute school that she attended for a few years. Paula and her husband Bruce took us to a unique restaurant built to resemble a Dutch smokehouse, but serving delicious New Mexican fare. 

I had a plate of smoked carne adovada that was truly excellent, while O had grilled halibut. We had a lovely, wide-ranging conversation. We hope Paula and Bruce can visit us in Boise one day soon.

P.

Cross-Country Road Trip! Days 2-7, Mile 1063: Family Time.

Okay, so we planned this trip around visiting O's brother, Rudy, in Massachusetts, but the start date of the trip was dictated by the 90th birthday party for my brother-in-law, Glenn Michel. Glenn is my sister Robin's husband. My sister died 10 years ago this year, just a few months after my mom passed.

Glenn is doing well at 90, and it was great seeing him and my nephew, my nieces, and my grandnephew and grandnieces, especially when we found out that my grandnephew and his wife are soon to have a child.

My sister, Catherine, and her husband David came as well. Unfortunately, my brother Burt was not able to make it, but at 87, I guess he has a good excuse.

After we left Las Vegas, we drove the 283 miles to Long Beach, where Glenn lives. Our hybrid averaged over 50 mpg, so we only had to gas up once at high CA prices.

The weather was beautiful and Catherine and David joined us on a short trip to Seal Beach, where O and her family used to visit when she was a kid. She has fond memories of sleeping on the beach with her family.

The beach is still beautiful. 

We strolled on the sand and the pier, then explored downtown Seal Beach. We stopped for cocktails and dinner at Walt's Wharf, a Seal Beach tradition.

Excellent martinis and grilled artichokes.

The house-smoked fish platter was delicious (albacore and salmon).

Glenn's birthday party was a lovely affair. It was great catching up with family we don't see as often as we'd like. The food was good, and the company was even better.

After the celebration, we headed south to Escondido to visit Teresa and Matthew. They are just beginning to enjoy being empty-nesters, and it was so good to see them living in a new way--peaceful and happy-- after the challenging years they've been through.

Matthew's mom died last month, and he spent nearly six weeks in England with his family before and after her death. So he was in a very tender place.

It was such a special time for the four of us to get together. We talked about life and death. We laughed. And we enjoyed each other's company on an even deeper level than before.

Of course, no trip to the San Diego area would be complete without a visit to Old Town. It's very touristy, of course, but there are some great shops and one of my favorite restaurants, the Old Town Mexican Cafe.

Great margaritas and fresh, handmade tortillas.

And some of the world's best carnitas. They offer three styles: shredded, chunky, and crispy.

Pro tip: order the crispy. The plate of porky goodness comes to you looking like a plate of hash browns--a flattened disc of shredded meat browned crisp on the outside and succulent and juicy on the inside. Accompaniments include onion, avocado, cilantro, and jalapeño. Wrapped in a warm, just-made tortilla and washed down with a generous pour of mezcal, it's a little morsel of heaven.

The weather was perfect--low 70s with a fresh ocean breeze--and full spring was everywhere--from the blooming coral trees to flowers in every hue.

On our last day, we drove down Point Loma to Sunset Cliffs. Again the weather was perfect.

The air was bright with the sharp salt scent of the sea.

Beautiful rock formations.

An aircraft carrier was leaving San Diego harbor with an escorting destroyer.

Sea birds abound.

T & M's cats kept us amused with their antics, especially 7-month-old Winston, a Russian Blue and, I firmly believe, part monkey and part liquid. He can flow into almost any position or nook or cranny.

It was a lovely visit, and we hated to leave.

But the road calls.

P.

Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 1, Mile 638: Viva Las Vegas!

 

This all started with O's desire to see her oldest brother, Rudy. He's getting on in years (as we all are) and his health is not the best. He lives in Massachusetts, so she hasn't seen him in quite a few years.

And while I took my first flight in two years last month to Hawaii, O still doesn't feel comfortable getting on a long flight.

Do you feel a road trip coming on? I do.

I did a cross-country in 1978, the year I turned 30, in a brand-new VW camper van. In August. With no air-conditioning. It was my honeymoon with my second wife. I still remember driving 500 miles straight, and I do mean straight, across Minnesota, 12-foot walls of corn hemming in the narrow corridor of road, the hot, humid air heavy with the smell of pig shit, with the windows wide open because it was even less bearable with them closed.

Fun times. So I'm hoping this trip will be different. We're driving a hybrid to mitigate the spiking price of gas. It isn't August. We have air-conditioning. And O and I have an almost forty-year bond that allows us to enjoy spending deep time together. 

We want to see as much of the country as we can, so we've planned a peregrination of prodigious proportions: a grand two-month circumnavigation starting in the southern tier from our daughter's place in Escondido through Phoenix, Socorro, Roswell, then, if we haven't been abducted by aliens, on to Amarillo, San Antonio, New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston with many stops in between.

After that, we head up to Asheville and the Shenandoah Valley to D.C., visiting many Civil War battlefields on the way, culminating at Gettysburg. We'll stop in Philadelphia, NYC, and Boston, before ending the outbound portion of the trip in Adams, MA, where Rudy lives.

We'll come back in mid to late May through the northern tier when the weather, I hope, improves in that area. Ithaca, We'll drive through Cleveland, Pleasureville, Kentucky (where O's other brother lives), Indianapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, Wausau, Wisconsin (where my dad was born), Fargo (other than Alaska, North Dakota is the one state I've never visited), and finally Missoula where one of O's sisters lives.

The journey of 10,000 miles begins with a small (638 mile) drive to Las Vegas.

I hate this town. I love this town.

It's big. Everything is on a magnified scale, slightly larger than life. It's loud. Music blasting everywhere and the constant clatter and bong of the neon-lit, animated slots.

It's sensory overload on steroids. We noticed that Chinese tourist dollars are huge here. A large percentage of the casino patrons were of Asian descent, and the design of many of the slots reflect this. Many are dragon-themed, many have have Chinese ideograms and lucky imagery incorporated in their design.

The worst of American celebrity culture is on display here. Almost everything has some celebrity brand name associated with it. All the celebrity chefs, no matter how minor, have restaurants here; some have more than one.

And that brings me to why I love this town. First, it's an overload of eye-candy (of the eye-gouging sort, sure, but still), with people watching that puts Walmart to shame. It's also a convenient place to break up the grueling drive from Boise to Escondido, and we have found a laid-back, low-rise hotel that offers some respite from the horrors of the Strip (they advertising the largest martinis in town, which helps). but most of all, Vegas is a world-class food destination.

Gone are the days when casinos used $2.99 steak dinners to lure gamblers. Now patrons queue up to pay top dollar for top of the line cuisine and still are willing to dump the rest of their money at the tables.The place may be overrun by TV celebrity chefs, but there are also dozens of places run by exceptional chefs from all over the world. 

Including Japan and, increasingly, China. When we were here over New Year's, we wanted Peking duck, and we got it. However, the restaurant we really wanted to go to was fully booked. This time we made sure we had reservations, both for seating and for duck.

Mott 32 is a Chinese restaurant in the Venetian Hotel. It's named for the first Chinese grocery in NYC, which opened in 1851 at 32 Mott St. They offer a number of "tweaked traditional" dishes, most Cantonese.They also offer "42-day, applewood-smoked Peking duck." We weren't sure exactly what that meant, but it sure sounded good.

We started with (of course) a gin martini (me) and Grey Goose rocks (O). 

We dug the groovy light fixture.

We started with hot and sour soup dumplings. We agreed that they were the best soup dumplings we've ever had. The filling was pork and incredible fresh and savory ginger in a tasty broth. You dip them in an excellent Chinese vinegar that perfectly sets off the sweetness of the pork. The resulting combination of flavors is stunning. I may never be able to eat soup dumplings anywhere else.

The Peking duck absolutely matched the standard set by the dumplings. It was superb. The skin was crispy and dripping with fat, smoke, and savory spices.

The meat was also very succulent and flavorful. Definitely one of the best versions of PD we've ever had.

It was a lovely start to the trip and set a high bar for for the next few months.

P.