Made it to Santa Fe

Monday July 6

 

Twelve hours of driving brought us to Memphis where we thought we might find a cool Elvis T-shirt.   Aidan now has a lasting sensory imprint of the word seedy, and I have to consider changing the name of this blog to Gullible’s travels because as soon as we pulled into a parking lot a couple of blocks from Beale St, a guy marks me as a sucker and hits me up for jumper cables to start his truck.  Not having any, I end up handing him some cash so he can borrow some from a cab company.  “You can take my wallet as collateral,” and “I’ll leave it in an envelope on your windshield in an hour.”  Yeah.   Dude, if by some odd chance you remember my license plate and happen to find this blog, you are one smooth talker.  No wonder you could afford to send your daughter to school to become a pharmacist (the spiel was almost worth the money).  The best thing about that stop-over, was a seeing a fuzzy burnt orange sunset dipping into the Mississippi.  Devin declared it totally worthy of the new camera she relentlessly says she needs. And while the barbeque sandwich I had wasn’t bad, the impression it left was that the chef was as tired and bored with its preparation as the local musicians were with their five thousandth rendition of some tune that somebody else made famous forty years ago. We hightailed it out of there to try to make it to Little Rock before we pooped out, pooping out at a rest stop half an hour east of there.  The rest stop itself was pretty “pooped out” too, so around 4 AM local time, I woke up and got back on the road.

 

The next stop was in Oklahoma City.  We had to find a book at the local Barnes and Noble for Aidan’s summer Center for the Humanities project.  The GPS Mom lent us worked a miracle and led us (not so straight) to one.  By the way, we’ve named her.  Aidan set the preference to British English so Victoria (Vickie for short) seems to fit the thing nicely.  Ursula says she sounds more like an Elizabeth but “Vickie” has already stuck.  After spiraling us toward a couple of destinations, and my ensuing comments that she seems to have been hitting the sauce, Vickie went on strike.  She up and quit right when we needed to find the road to Hyde Memorial State Park in Santa Fe.  We found it anyway.  The camper climbed the winding route past multi-million dollar adobe mansions and between mountains bunched together like a lined up population of double D’s in C size cups. All the spruce, cedar and pine, remind me of pipe cleaners, and the effect of the light, naturally air-conditioned and tree scented air on my psyche was like an attitude reboot.  We spent the night in a campground with neither hook-ups nor other people.  It was really cool (in both senses of the word).

 

The next morning, everybody justifiably wanted (and needed) a shower and we decided we’d settle for a campground near the city.  So after a short, fairwell hike to some excellent rocks and waterfall (where Devin again assured us a nice camera was the only way to adequately record the event), we set off down the mountain.  We found a nice little citified campground (without Vickie’s help) at Los Campos where I now sit writing this entry.  We had a long day today trying to bike to the plaza.  It was much farther than we estimated and the kids got tired after seven or eight miles.  I had to turn around and bike back to the campground to get the camper while everyone waited because an intense migraine to hit Devin really hard.  After rest, dinner, hydration and another shower, she’s as good as new.  Aidan and I went riding on our bikes to get some smoothies and a new USB cable for Vickie (she sure worked well for the young geek-squad guy at Best Buy). 

 

Everyone’s asleep.  The kids are snuggled in the camper and Ursula is snoozing in the tent.  I’m sitting at the picnic table under our awning with our tacky, multi-colored lights reflecting off of the keyboard and the bright, full moon shining just above my eyebrows.  The heat of the day has turned into a cool evening chill and I’m ready to sign off, and crawl into the tent for a deep, outside sleep.  Tomorrow?  Santa Fe via bus.  Thursday? Maybe Taos.