Confidential to San Antonio

The Riverwalk is nice.  I was actually quite surprised.  Running a stagnant body of water through your downtown makes it a little more humid, but it's still a nice strolling and people watching place.  The rest of your downtown though... kind of like Little Detroit.   

Seriously the Riverwalk is pretty and full of people even on a hot Wednesday night.  Sure it's full of tourist traps and terrible chain restaurants, but we're Americans, what else would you expect.  But head up to the surface of downtown and it's like you've wondered out onto the surface after the end of the world.  Blowing trash, empty surface parking lots, boarded up buildings, the only sign of life I saw was at a bus stop where someone was getting arrested.  It was like wondering behind the scenes at Disneyland.

Pretty!  No photos were allowed above grade.

I can tell having a downtown address in San Antonio is the kiss of death for a business, and after all this is Texas the land of wide open spaces right.  Who would want to be downtown, commie.  But can't you find of excess hipsters from Austin to live in some of the upper stories of some of these great buildings overlooking the river?  It's where I'd want to live if I was forced to live here.

Two Photos of Carlsbad

I wanted to give you a couple of photos of Carlsbad, but Blogger was being a jerk the other day.  Enjoy

At the intersection of Boyd and Chapman.  Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal in New Mexico

Either the lair of Dr. No or the lunchroom at Carlsbad Caverns

Somebody Please Mess with Texas

We've been in Texas for about four hours now, about four hours too long. Something needs to be done to break up the monotony of this place, like a mountain range or moving one of the spare great lakes down here. The landscape is flat scrub broken occasionally by slightly hilly scrub.

The speed limit is eighty, which seems nuts. But if you don't do it you'll be run down by a three-quarter ton pickup with the biggest brush guard you've ever seen.

So far I haven't seen a long horn or a cowboy, but west Texas had a damn lot of oil wells surrounded by Halliburton trucks.

Seems to me, you'd have to be a little slow to give up the Ivy League life of a Boston brahman and Maine summers to move out here to pretend to be a cowboy.

On to Texas

It's going to be a long haul today.  We're leaving New Mexico, finally turning east and heading across Texas to San Antonio.  Once there, we're going to spend a day there.  No not to see the Riverwalk or the Alamo, booooring.  No, we are going to go to Six Flags tomorrow.  That's 'merica, not all of this outdoor stuff.

As for yesterday and Carlsbad, we had a good time.  I (Boyd) have been to Carlsbad, but that was twenty years ago and while we did a lot, we didn't actually go in the main cavern then but another less developed one.  The national park actually has 110 distinct caves within their boundary.  All of the outer cave tours though are held on the weekends though, so main cave it was.  I've always heard the main cavern po-pooed a bit because it's so developed.  It's built out with sidewalks, lights, elevators and even a lunchroom.  While I can't speak to the need for a lunchroom, we used those elevators to get out because at its lowest, the main cave is almost 1000' below the entrance.

The cavern was amazing.  I know, everything has been amazing but I guess it's a big country full of amazing sites.  Anyway, the main event in the cave is the 'Big Room' called such because it has a floor area of 8.2 acres.  Or as Will Rogers put it, "the Grand Canyon with a roof on it."

Unfortunately we planned a whole day at the caves and even after the two of us nerding it up, taking hundreds of photos and reading ever board in there, we still only took half a day.  Liz really wanted to watch the thousands of bats fly out of the cave at sunset, so we could either sit in the car for hours or do something else.  Else we did.  We drove another 40 miles south into Texas to see the Guadalupe Mountains NP.  It contains Texas' highest point, their own El Capitan and preserves a west Texas historical ranch.  With that little side trip that brought our total of National Parks and Monuments visited to 17.  Not bad for one trip.

For some reason, Blogger won't let me add any media today.  So instead, enjoy this ode to Texas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QltlctqfY4E

Oil Change

When in Santa Fe it's just the custom to get an oil change. Well we had to, it's been 5000 plus miles since we started, so it was due.

We took that time and our bikes and rode into the old part of town. We went and saw the San Miguel Mission dating from 1610 and toured the Governors Palace which claims to be the oldest inhabited structure in America. The caviat being that after the Pueblo Revolt of 1683 the indians made it their home and not so much the seat of Spanish colonial power in the southwest. Aside from that it was filled with very interesting relics of Santa Fe's past under three different flags.

We're heading south now to Carlsbad NP for some cool underground cave times and really bad motels. With the high, high heat, deserts, high winds (50mph plus) and a near total lack of public campgrounds we will be moteling it until we get to New Orleans. It'll cost us a few more bucks a day, but daily showers will be a nice change.

Oh and for all you west coasters, we just had some Chick Fil A. Yum! Thanks Linda.

On Trikes

If you feel you're too old to ride yer hog on you're cross country trip, don't go out and buy a trike. If you still feel the need to ride that trike across America, but you've got so much stuff that you need to tow a trailer, just give up and buy a Chrysler Seabring convertible and admit defeat, because you're not fooling anyone.

I'd guess we pass a couple on one every half hour or less while we're on the road. I never knew there were so many in the world.

Colorado

It seems like we've done a lot and not blogged about since our last post.  I guess we have, we've taken down all of southwest Colorado, left it in ruins.

Let's look back chronologically shall we.

June 16th - 17th, Mesa Verde NP: 

The Cliff Place

This was my (Boyd) third trip to Mesa Verde, and while the first two were at age 4 and 12 I remembered quite a lot about the place.  Those memories did nothing to take away from the sense of awe.  It's haunting to walk around relics (ruins don't do the preservation justice) that are 800 years old.  We toured the Cliff Place and Spruce Tree House the first day and the next day we toured the Long House and the Step House.  It's so arid there that building timbers, painted petroglyphs and even corn survives from the Pueblo's time there.

While Mesa Verde is World Heritage site, and quite a draw as National Parks go, it was kind of quiet there, especially in comparison to Arches or Yosemite which at time felt more like the work of Walt Disney and less of the work of Nature.  Tickets are required to go on the more popular dwellings, which seemed to help weed out the crowds.  Not because of the price, because they were only $3.  More likely because it required following simple instructions and reading the large posted signs.  And reading can be hard.

June 17th - 18th, Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP: 

Two Empire State Building tip-to-tip could fit in there

More canyons!!!  The West is full of canyons that 1930's America just didn't get around to filling with dams and reservoirs.  And while yes green hyrdopower and cool drinks are great, so are canyons and wild rivers.  Never heard of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP you say, well we can think good ol' Slick Willy for signing it into existence in 1999.  

We drove north from Mesa Verde into the middle of Colorado, driving over 10,000' passed and through flush spring meadows and aspen groves.  We tried to see the town of Telluride, but they were having their bluegrass festival, which judging by the road check points, endless traffic and people camped out where ever they could, is kind of a big deal.  We could tell it's not really a bluegrass festival because A: it's in the wrong mountains and B: the Decemberist were the headliners.  Bluegrass now means whiny alt-folk-rock to twenty-somethings, not hillbillies with mandolins.

The Black Canyon was again, an amazing hole in the earth.  Only a couple million years old (which is a baby in geology) and carved through tough igneous rocks, it makes a 1500' plus shear chasm in otherwise rolling hills.  We saw a bobcat and went on a ranger led night hike.  A good time had by all.  I assume it was good for the bobcat anyway. 

June 18th, Ouray to Silverton CO:


We left the Black Canyon and headed south once again, through another stretch of high mountain passes and old west towns and abandoned mines.  Our first stop was at Ouray, just north of the Red Mountain Pass (11,600') along the Million Dollar Highway.  A million dollars was a lot more money back then.  We had a nice lunch at the Ouray brewery and walked around town some.  We stopped in a liquor store to get me a new bottle of bourbon.  The guy running the counter went off about how they just got back in stock some Silverton Brewery beer after the "fire."  We told him we just finished a beer, but since we were headed that way we'd be sure to check it out.

So on to Silverton, famous for being the terminus to the Durango to Silverton narrow gauge steam railroad and frozen in time from it's mining days.  We poked around town some until we found said brewery located next to two very burned buildings, but open none the less.  We stopped in just as they were closing, which was odd since it was 4:30PM.  The owner/brewer/bartender told us they were shutting down in a bit for the Taste of Silverton and told us we had to check it out.  So we did.

Another beer, more food

Pretty much a locals thing and a reason to celebrate the melting of all the snow, a lot of the town's restaurants camp out on Blair St, serve delicious cheap grub while local musicians play to the crowd lounging on picnic tables.  It was a great, laid back affair and the kind of small town thing I didn't know existed anymore.  We were sad to leave.  Even sadder when we couldn't find a camping spot south of town and had to get a $100 tiny-ass motel room in Durango to keep from sleeping in the car.

So here we are, present time in Durango.  We're off to explore it some and then down to Santa Fe and New Mexico.  Wait, there's a New Mexico.