Santa Rosa Lake State Park, NM to Holbrook, AZ
06.15am
Courtney wakes up early, desperate for the bathroom. She returns to the tent urging me to get up. The sun is about to rise over Santa Rosa lake. New Mexico bills itself as the “State of Enchantment” and I’m starting to see why.
10.07am
For a few miles before the town truck stop of Clines Corners the land around I-40 is carpeted with small yellow flowers. Goldenrod, I think.
12.30pm
We hit the outskirts of Albuquerque, looking for a wireless connection, believing that Starbucks has them. We drive downtown looking for one. Unlike a lot of American cities, Albuquerque’s downtown looks free of chain businesses. There is breezy, colourful modern architecture which reminds me of Italy and Spain, and lots of adobe style buildings. There’s even an historic downtown district – old adobes and Spanish colonial buildings that are now home to artists and craftsmen. But, of course, no Starbucks.
We manage to find a library that’s wired, and I’m sad to say that’s all we do in Albuquerque. Both Courtney and I have been charmed by what little of the city we’ve seen. One day we’ll return here, and we’ll also take a trip north to Santa Fe, which we’ve missed entirely on this trip.
15.00pm
Just over an hour west of Albuquerque are the lava beds of El Malpais, “the badlands”. We stand on a craggy limestone bluff overlooking the cracked black ground, remnants of an ancient lava flow. Apparently the lava formed tubes up to eighteen miles long which contain ice even in summer. We stop to explore the bluff for a while, and Courtney has little panic attacks every time I get near the edge. I take her hand and we both crawl on our bellies to look down on the lava beds.
17.10pm
The last ten or so miles of New Mexico look less enchanting than the previous four hundred. For the previous hour we’ve been bombarded with billboards advertising Indian trading posts. Most of them are little more than kitsched-up motorway service stations. A few of these trading posts are legitimate Native American businesses on reservation land. As we’re looking at White Buffalo Ranch with its fake cave paintings and “No Indian goods made in China” motto, we hit the border.
While New Mexico courted us all the way with its prettiness, Arizona is pacing itself, suggesting that there’s wonder here, but we’re going to have to wait for it. The landscape is harsher, craggier, drier.
17.49pm
We arrive at the petrified forest and think the gates are closing, only to find that Arizona doesn’t bother with daylight savings time. So, although the sun is already close to the horizon it’s really only ten to five.
Hearing the name “Petrified Forest” for the first time I imagined a literal forest of stone tree trunks standing eerie and vertical in the desert. No such thing exists, at least not here. I’m almost disappointed.
Volcanic activity begat the Petrified Forest. Volcanic mud smothered the trees and time turned them to stone. For millions of years the petrified remnants, stone logs and twigs, have lain scattered over this portion of the Painted Desert. They say you can see a multitude of colours in the stone trees, but in the setting sun we can see only red, orange and white.
There are also the remnants of a pueblo, a Native American village. A few foundation stones hinting at a floor plan and a jumble of petroglyphs (chiselled images) on enormous rocks nearby are all that remain of the people who lived here. It is thought they left the village to join one of the larger groups in the area and abandoned their old customs. Today the petroglyphs are indecipherable. Maybe one day future humans will find old McDonald’s signs and puzzle over their meaning.
19.30pm (Arizona time)
We arrive at our resting place for tonight, a classic piece of Americana, the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook. Built in the late 1940’s, it has been a favourite haunt of Route 66 travellers for years. Each room is a separate concrete wigwam with fairly basic facilities. Its diminutive size will discourage anyone particularly tall or wide, but it suits Courtney and I just fine.
