Breakfast, swim and we leave the beaut Marriott with the help of a friendly child who, seeing me struggling to get the luggage trolley through the door, leaps to hold the door for an old lady. Gorgeous manners. She is another of the elements which colour a day beautiful.
It is a Sunday and the big city roads are reasonable. If you don’t count roadworks, one of Bruce’ pet hates.
Albuquerque is a town without a defined centre. It is huge and flat with big straight roads lined by low buildings. It seems to go on for ever across its desert plain. We chug through downmarket districts with cheap motels and characterful shops such as the Beer Kitchen, Chocolate Dude, Bobo Tea, Einstein Brothers Bagels, the Smoke Shop and, interestingly, the Empire Board Games Library.
There’s a tiny little shiny white building in a town square. It is not much bigger than an ice cream parlour. In fact, that’s what it looks like. It seems to be the local police station.
Our road out of town crosses lots of roads with the names of leading US universities - Yale, Harvard, Cornell - which reflect the fact that we are traversing the vast, sprawling campus of the University of New Mexico. Oh, look, in the midst of it all, a University Pawn shop.
Big medical centres and a senior citizens art centre, lots of urban murals, and into another downmarket area with bars on the windows of closed businesses.
What are all those people doing lined up in that leafy little park? Oh, heavens. They are queued for food. It is a soup kitchen.
A hot dog place is shaped like a dachshund dog. Haha. And some nice adobe-style buildings, even an Adobe Wendy’s. Those mighty mountains make a grand backdrop…
And here are the Route 66 signs. Yes, Bruce, I know it’s now interstate 40, but it still has Route 66 signs and I am old and remember the TV series. So do the road signs people.
Oh, so we are turning joining 25 South. OK. Just 223 miles to Las Cruces, our next destination.
Roadside oil storage tanks, messy industry splayed out along the route, dead cars, wasteland, piles of dirt, pipes. All cities have these glum areas somewhere.
Soon, the road opens out with the plains stretching out on either side.
Ah, glorious.
Golden cottonwoods streak through the centre of the landscape. The mountains rise high, softly blue against an even softer blue sky. It is suddenly all romantic and lyrical. We cross the Rio Grande. It runs flat and wide and shallow, hemmed by a riot of cottonwoods. A sign tell us we are entering the Isleta Reservation.
And, whoosh. We are back in the vast open wilderness.
Breaking Bad territory says Bruce. No man’s land where you can get lost.
Powerlines emerge in the distance. A few black cattle in the distance.
A rail line out there crawling across the landscape with endless goods carriages.
Prairie Home Companion has come on to PBS Radio. It’s a repeat from the old Garrison Keillor days but fresh as the desert air in content. We settle back and listen contentedly as the prairie passes beside us.
A little flat cloud of uniform grey roofs reveals a quaint little somewhere nowhere burb. So neat. Why are they here?
The mountain range goes on and on at the side and up ahead.
Here’s a vineyard. Ugh, It is stunted and scrawny. It’s up for sale.
We’re chomping down on pinion nut brittle. Well, Bruce is. I hate it. I’ve got some jalapeno peanut brittle.
Brittles are really big in this part of the USA and they are irresistibly terrific. We’ll be guilty later.
Traffic is mixed cars and trucks. Steady, for a change.
Sign: High Activity Deer.
Frisky eh. We don't see any.
Mesquite appears on the landscape. And desert junipers. And then low grassy bush.
The road ribbons towards the mountains.
A line of trucks is impeccably neatly parked in a rest area alongside a group of eco loos. No sign of the truckies. Are they all in the loos?
Under a blue cement bridge and out to a view of vivid green crops. Surely not rice? Long horn cattle. A farmhouse.
Now the wilderness returns. Now and then a flash of light glints from a distant roof or window revealing settlement out there. A large hand-painted sign indicates that the settlement must be called Wellborn.
Sign: Entering Socorro County
Sign: Durkin Diesel.
Mixed farms. Huge corrugated iron sheds.
A super speeding yellow truck overtakes us. Whoosh. Phew.
A dead coyote at the roadside.
Escondida appears in the distance. Buildings, Trash. Caravans, Trailer homes. Fibro houses. Junk yards.
Wilderness.
Very Large Array, says a mysterious sign. It’s radio telescopes, says Bruce, in a huge desert array to probe deep in the universe.
The tallest mountain has a huge M etched into the top of it.
A fabulous adobe mansion sits on a rocky outcrop.
Sign: Eyes Up. Phone Down.
Sign: Apache Ridge State Park.
We’re close to the mountains now, the land softly undulating from verge to piedmont. Washes and gentle gullies, little mesquite trees, junipers. Other ranges are blue in the distance. Yellow cottonwoods on the landscape.
Rattlesnake country, announces Bruce out of the blue.
The mountainscape is heavenly. Yet more ranges are revealed. They seem to come one after another. Some peaks are perfect points. Volcanic vents, explains Bruce.
Yet another range, crinkly and blue in silhouette. Mountains on all sides. A wide blue yonder. Timeless beauty. The dust trail of a car way out there.
Ooh. a dramatic big dip. The Nogal Canyon.
This is the Canam Highway, a sign reveals. Big brown mountains now. Creased. A sign points to Red Rock. I can’t see anything red. Reddish, perhaps.
We’ve come 13,000 miles, says Bruce.
The land is flat again. Layers of mountains far away. Then we curl into a dramatic gorge. Sign: Gusty Winds May Exist.
La Canada Alamosa. It is a settlement of trailers and a house with a flag flying.
Land undulates. Little tufty grass, tough little shrubs, stunted mesquite.
Sign to Elephant Butte and Lake.
Hot Springs Historic District.
We slide into a very, very quiet town.
Truth or Consequences. This is it.
Truly.
This town is called Truth or Consequences.
We fill up with petrol and I try to buy postcards to celebrate this bizarre name.
None? Oh.
The servo girl, in her dazzling realm of sugary
Try downtown, she suggests.
The town is quiet, quiet, quiet. Nothing-is-moving quiet.
There is a museum. Look, it is open.
We stop the car and race over. The museum seems to be full of interesting geological specimens.
An elderly gentleman is manning the counter.
Do you have any postcards of Truth or Consequences, I ask. Like the girl in the service station, the old man seems mildly surprised.
Er, no. But we have some of the museum, he proffers.
Outside the museum is a quaintly folksy, ok, incredibly ugly mosaic monument which carries two different sources of water.
It turns out that once upon a time, this town’s claim to fame was its hot springs and bath houses.
Cowboy spas.
Who knew?
This is Geronimo Springs. Here are the spring waters.
We run our fingers in the hot water and read about the cowboys coming here to heal what ailed them.
A couple of utes go along the street.
A young man on some sort of electric skateboard zips by at high speed.
We take a selfie and move on.
Google tells us that the town earned its name from a TV show which offered to present itself at any town which changed its name to the name of the show - Truth or Consequences.
Truth or Consequences it has been ever since.
Out onto an undulating plateau we drive.
Trailer home communities in little valleys.
Caballo Reserve, calls itself an oasis, pale and low beside a mountain.
Every rise in the road brings a new vista.
Low mesas. Rio Grande out there. A laden hitchhiker.
Pristine desert on one side of the road. Neat rice crops on the other. Rice? Out here? Desert rice?
Another mountain vista.
We seem to have hit pecan central. This is the source of my favourite nut.
There’s a pecan processing factory.
Rincon. Jornada des Muerto historic sites.
More craggy mountains.
Mesas in steps against the horizon.
We’re crossing the Chihuahua Desert. While it is flat and dry, the mountains etched on the skyline all around us are just thrilling.
Radium Springs. It’s a flat little settlement with lots of pinion pines, yuccas and more pecans.
More pecan orchards. More.
Here come the Organ Mountains rising stately and decorative with those pale long rounded forms giving the organ pipe impression which prompted their name.
And there, sprawled at their feet, lies the university city of Las Cruces. It is the second largest city in New Mexico.
Rice crops and pecan crops flash by and then the burbs appear, elegant adobe houses, a brown modern adobe housing development.
The Here come traffic lights. This is it. Hello Las Cruces.
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