The Voyage Beyond CA

How many of my readers have spent St. Patrick's Day in Grants, New Mexico? Well, we just did - a night not to be forgotten - or repeated.

But first, some background. The high desert parts of New Mexico (there are several) share a lot in common with Bakersfield CA; in fact, the same music is on the radio, and the same signs litter the highway. The first country song we heard (after the currently much maligned public radio station finally petered out) was " God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy." And the first song playing as we crossed into New Mexico on Route 40 at Gallup, was - you guessed it - the same song. It's like eastern CA and all of AZ were not there. In my mind not a bad thing.

But I digress. Grants is in the NE part of the state, on the road to Albuquerque, but a universe away in any measure you want to pick. It was a ranching town until uranium was discovered in1950, when it enjoyed a boom for a generation while the native population(yes, those pesky redskins) died off from toxic waste in the land and the water. Uranium is a nasty thing all round. Grants has a museum devoted to it, where one could (we didn't, it being St.Paddy's day, and all) go underground to a replica of a uranium mine. Actually, I might like to do that some day - on a prior trip we went to the Carlsbad Nuclear waste facility, where they "take care" of the trans-uranium waste" (defined in gobbledy-gook) and for which there is a specially built road outside of Roswell, en route to Carlsbad, just for those trucks transporting said trans-uranium waste - so the civilians don't get "too" contaminated.

But I further digress. The guide book said that during the boom, Grants attracted lots of different people, giving it a"cosmopolitan culture," for instance the Monte Carlo dining room and Lounge :

So I looked for some Irish evidence of that cosmopolitan history, but the only 2 bars that the hotel "recommended" were both real cowboy roadhouse dives, where, when a fight breaks out the customers duck because guns will be exhibited if not used. And I chose not to go in. Gary was smart; he stayed in the hotel room and watched the spread of the nuclear disaster on TV.

Today we left Grants before the light of day;





and traveled old Indian routes, as you can see from the points of interest: all pointing to extinct Indian settlements on the high desert.









And, some modern day Indian settlements.








And, so here we are in Roswell, where is was 90 degrees today.