Go west, young man:  2013 vacation, Day 1

I’m writing from a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico on the second day of our year’s vacation.  The itinerary for this year is Santa Fe, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Durango, Colorado.  We spent all of yesterday driving from Austin to Santa Fe, thirteen hours and seven hundred miles’ worth of travel.  We went out Texas 29 through Burnet and Llano, then picked up Texas 71 to Brady, and US 87 up to San Angelo, where we stopped long enough for lunch at a Subway and moved on.

After San Angelo the towns got a lot thinner on the ground.  The only places of any size we went through were Big Spring, Lamesa and Seminole, where M got to see her first real tumbleweed blowing across the street.  (There were more tumbleweeds in New Mexico.)

A ways past Seminole we reached the New Mexico state line and Hobbs.

The people of Hobbs want you to be sure that you know where you are.

Past Hobbs we got into a serious oil patch.  The landscape on both sides of the road was filled with pumpjacks, mostly working ones.  The highway was really beat up from all the oilfield service trucks coming through there, and we had to reduce speed.

Also about this time, we started running into summer thundershowers.  (Fine thing, isn’t it, that we have to go to the desert to get rained on.)  The rain chased us much of the way to Santa Fe.

We stopped at Roswell to stretch, and M found this chainsaw sculpture of an alien.  She decided she approved of a town that believed in little green men.

When it wasn’t raining, we got to see miles and miles of miles and miles.  This is Chaves County on US 285, which runs up southern New Mexico from Roswell almost to Santa Fe.

After a lot more miles of miles, we finally started climbing into the hills.  As it always seems to do, sunset made the scenery much more picturesque and attractive.

It was almost 9:00 Mountain time when we found our hotel and checked in.  By that time we had been on the road for thirteen hours, and I was ragged.  Some struggling around on unfamiliar streets in the dark finally got us to an Applebees for supper, and we came straight back to the hotel and crashed.

Today we’re going to go into downtown Santa Fe and be tourists, and tomorrow we’ll start off for Las Vegas.