At long last the series of updates coming from Epic Road Trip 2009 are on the way:
Day 1: To New Mexico - The team added a guest highpointer in Jared for this trip. He had already come along for the Louisiana trip and was already on the way to becoming a steely eyed highpointer himself. We began the trip by having a sleepover at my apartment to reduce the time it would take the next morning to get on the road. We could have had more fun than we did but had imposed an alcohol prohibition with the aim of preventing a repeat of the hung-over climb of Guadalupe peak. This seemed prudent as the first mountain on our itinerary was almost 4,000 feet higher than our tallest mountain to date. We just relaxed and watched a movie.
We awoke cold sober and hit the road with the goal of reaching Taos, New Mexico where we had a room booked for the night. Soon Nate’s Honda Fit was piled with all of our stuff. It was a snug but comfortable fit (note: I looked for a different word to avoid the obvious pun here but could not find one that worked as well. As such, though it is cliche, there is no pun intended). I had exercised the considerable forethought to prepare the Epic Playlist 2009. This playlist allowed us to listen to music for the entire trip that never repeated and was always at least pretty good but usually great. Leaving Fort Worth on empty stomachs, it was not long before we began to feel rather peckish. Wichita Falls seemed the most obvious choice for a place to eat and we almost had some Mexican food but Nate managed to blow it in the driving department (granted there were some strange things going on roadwise). Somehow we found ourselves leaving the moderately sized city having not found anything to eat. The road forged on and we followed, but hunger was growing to a crisis level. At this point we threw ourselves at the mercy of the onboard navigation system, willing to eat pretty much anything. We soon found ourselves leaving the highway and headed into Iowa Park, Texas a quaint town of very little consequence. The place the navigation system had us bound for was long abandoned but we soon found “downtown” and there was a deli full of the after-church crowd. We walked in and immediately met with suspicious glances from the clientele. We were obviously “not from around there” and further had obviously not just gotten out of church. Nonetheless, we had what we were looking for out of Iowa Park and hit the road feeling much better about ourselves.
The drive wound on uneventfully as we passed the Big Texan in Amarillo without trying to eat a 72 oz. steak. One sometimes forgets the sheer size of the state of Texas until you drive a certain trajectory that forces you to travel seemingly forever and barely escape its clutches. We finally made the New Mexico border and were well on our way to a successful day.
As we turned off of I40 we found such desolation as can only be seen in rural New Mexico. I remember exactly this sort of landscape from childhood trips between Roswell and Albuquerque.
As we drove hunger set in again and we decided a meal would be a good choice especially considering that the hour was growing ever later. The next town of any consequence we reached was Las Vegas, NM and we soon found ourselves craving Mexican food. It is important to understand the term Mexican food when talking with someone from Texas because Texans do not actually mean food from Mexico. To a Texan, Mexican food is more correctly Tex-Mex and it is a genre that Texans feel quite strongly about. Once you cross the New Mexico border this cuisine dries up and gives way to New Mexican food.
New Mexican food resembles Tex-Mex but has more Native American influence and relies on the red and green chili pepper in almost everything. This is why the official state question is, “Red or green?” We soon found ourselves confronted with this question and after I briefed Jared on the whole situation he hesitantly answered “Christmas” in order to have some of each. Personally I think this whole thing is silly since green chilies are superior to red in every way, but I guess New Mexicans need something to be proud of. Having eaten dinner we were soon to discover something else New Mexicans can be proud of.
As we had been driving we noticed mountains rising around us. These were not the same type of mountains we had encountered up to this point in places like Arkansas and Louisiana or even those in Texas. These were legitimate, honest-to-God mountains. The closer we came to Taos, the more imposing they became which had us soon fearing what we had gotten ourselves into. We stopped off at a scenic overlook to scope out the scenery (and pee). I pointed the camera in the general direction of Wheeler Peak:
The shorts and t-shirts we had left Texas in were proving insufficiently warm in the failing mountain light. We soon came to our hotel in Taos and began establishing our game plan for the morning, itwould come early.
No comments:
Post a Comment