#5BDA The New Mexico Saga, Part 2

From Colorado Springs I went back to New Mexico.  My first stop was Las Vegas, NM, which is a lot smaller and less interesting than the Nevada one.  The main attractions are an old train station and a long-closed AMC car dealership that still has the signage.

The next day was Halloween and where better to spend it than Tucumcari, NM?  Um...just about anywhere else?  I became fascinated with Tucumcari when I was looking for a model for the town of Little Mesa in The Best Light.  The town has an interesting history as part of Route 66.  A lot of people like the Joads went through there from Dust Bowl states to California during the Great Depression and so a lot of motels cropped up.  For a time in the 40s and 50s there was about as much neon on Tucumcari's main drag as the Strip in Vegas.  I just naturally gravitate towards weird shit like that so that was why I decided to go back a second time.

Though what you soon realize is there's not a hell of a lot to do in the town.  There's a dinosaur museum that's kinda neat and a KMart and...not much else.  Walmart hasn't even decimated the local shops by opening a store there.

This was one of the few times I went out at night because it's cool to see the neon signs when they're all lit up.

The next morning I went to Roswell, which is south and maybe a little east or west.  Like going from Vegas to Phoenix there wasn't a big highway so I had to take a bunch of little roads so it took a while to get there.

The first day there I went to the UFO Museum in Roswell.  Even if you're not a believer it's kinda neat just to see all the UFO stuff.

The motel I reserved was a dump.  The toilet was really noisy and the shower was gross, so I tried not to spend a lot of time in that room.

The next day was a slack day but since the motel sucked and I was bored I made a last minute decision to go out to Carlsbad Caverns, which is south of there.  I managed to get there in time to see a lot of the Caverns, though not all of them because they'd closed some of it for the day already.  The Caverns are like being in a musty basement crawlspace only there are a lot more rocks.  Not really any bats in that area at that time of day.

There was one last stop in New Mexico, on the border with Arizona at some little town called Lordsburg or something like that.  Then it was back to Phoenix for the rest of November, because I was running out of money and naively thought maybe in a larger city area I could find a job, at least temporarily.  Ha ha, yeah right.

The final leg of Grumpy Bulldog Does America begins next week!