Spotted on the Roadside: The World’s Largest Pistachio

May 19, 2017 1 Comment read Attractions, Mountain, New Mexico, Spotted on the Roadside, Travel, USA, West

Some days you feel like a nut, some days you just stand next to the world’s largest nut. In Alamogordo, that nut is 30 feet tall and would likely even satisfy the Hulk’s salty snack cravings when he’s at his hangriest*. This roadside monument stands outside Pistachio Tree Ranch, and was dedicated to the memory of its founder, Thomas McGinn. Inside, they have a full tasting bar of all of their different flavored nuts and brittles of which I availed myself of more than a few (and bought more than a few, too, their atomic hot chili pistachio brittle is amaaaaazing) and some wine tasting as well (including pistachio wine) of which I did not partake seeing as how it was something like 10am when I visited and just a little early in the day to be getting my drink on, pistachio based or otherwise.

This giant nut effigy is also where we came to a tentative decision about our post-retirement lives. Sure, it’s still early to be thinking about that, but as anyone who knows me knows, I live nowhere if not in my own head, and I’ve been doing some thinking about my life and its direction. I still don’t know what I want to do in the intervening years, but while we relaxed in the shade of the giant pistachio, an RV pulled up, and a retired couple emerged, holding their dog. Jason nudged me and asked, “Is that us?” I agreed that it was. The two of us, rambling around in an RV, going wherever we want? Sounds good to me.

Spotted on US-54 in Alamogordo, NM

*I did a quick rough calculation and determined if a regular pistachio is approximately half an inch long and 4 calories, that this giant pistachio is still not made of materials that are recommended for human consumption.

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Carlsbad Caverns National Park

May 17, 2017 Comments Off read Attractions, Mountain, New Mexico, The Great Outdoors, Travel, USA, West

When I plan a trip, I definitely push my limits in order to see and do as much as possible. It’s about finding a balance. Ambitious but achievable. Aggressive but not arduous. I’m not going to skip sleeping entirely, but I will forgo a few hours’ sleep if it means I have the leeway to add something awesome to the docket. Which is how I found myself at four in the morning in freezing cold pitch darkness outside a gas station in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, fumbling around, trying to figure out how to open the gas tank door on the rental car. There was no release lever on the driver’s side floor. Nothing under or on the dashboard. Not in the glove compartment nor in the center arm console. No mention was made in the owner’s manual. And THAT would be because a fuel door button doesn’t exist on that car, the fuel door just needs to be pressed inward to click open*. Soooo I suppose this means that I’m coming to an age where I start to complain about all this newfangled technology and reminisce about the good old days of foot-powered cars. What I’m saying is, I am deeply interested in buying an Amazon Echo Silver.

We covered a lot of ground before dawn, the sun rising fortuitiously to Westworld’s rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” over what appeared to be a shootout between plywood giants.

Most of the rest of the drive was uneventful: a flat lot of nothing to look at except for a few cows, some ramshackle buildings, oil pumps, an entire town that smelled like a fart that had been bottled up by a lactose intolerant milkshake guzzling giant for a generation, and some kind of oil or gas tower thing that appeared to have a continuous purposeful fireball shooting out of the top. You can buy about a million cliched items boasting that travel is about the journey, but I’d argue in many cases, the destination is far more compelling. You don’t take a ten hour flight and turn around to come home, boasting about what an amazing journey you took that involved one cup of tea, three trips into a bathroom the size of kindergarten cubby, a battle over the shared armrest, and mild turbulence. You aren’t like, “Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you the riveting tale of the entire town that smelled like a fart and why it made my entire trip worthwhile” unless you are me. No. You set out to do something, whether that’s see something or eat something or lay in a prone position in a location that has better weather than home. This day, I set out not to look at an unchanging landscape for hours on end but to see Carlsbad Caverns.

Carlsbad Caverns became a national monument in 1923 and was upgraded to full national park status in 1930. This gigantic limestone marvel was described by Will Rogers as “the Grand Canyon with a roof over it”, and I’m hard pressed to find a better way to explain its vastness. Whether one hikes from the natural entrance or takes the elevator shortcut (I’m not deriding the latter, as an experienced indoorswoman I also elected to take the elevator), once you reach the Hall of the Giants, you’re nearly a thousand feet underground surrounded on all sides by speleothems of all shapes and sizes. It’s so large, when a noisy group would push past me gaping in awe, I would not be able to hear them any longer after a minute or so even though we were in the same cave chamber. Looking around is disorienting, with all the formations on every side I felt as though I’d stepped into one of those children’s rock crystal growing kits.

It is an astounding place, to be so deep under the surface of the earth, to be surrounded by these formations, to hear nothing but the occasional clink of rings and wristwatches against the guardrails and steady drips of water from overheard. I took so many photos and even a few videos but the truth of the matter is that I have yet to see a photo by any photographer that could convey the vastness of the caverns and the true beauty of the speleothems. It truly must be seen to be believed.

Here’s a ton of photos anyway.

Nope. Nope nope nope.

You know why I took this photo. You know.

After our walk around the caverns, we were both ravenous, having been up since the wee hours without eating save for some guacachips procured at the aforementioned gas station. We decided to check out the on site restaurant and Jason proclaimed that if there was a cave burger, he was going to eat it. Not only did they have a burger, it was literally called a cave burger, and with the gauntlet thus thrown and the challenge answered, his food decision was made. I selected a “1923 panini” (which, if you were paying attention, is the year Carlsbad was made a national monument) and was also drawn to a drink bottle named, simply, “Cherry beverage” with an orchard listed on the side. I took a bite of my panini and pronounced it “not bad”, and Jason offered me a bite of his cave burger.

…It literally tasted exactly like the school cafeteria burgers of my youth. Exactly. That precooked patty pulled out of a warming bin that tasted like it had been boiled brought back a rush of emotions, none of them good**. I gave him half my sandwich because I couldn’t in good conscience let him go back to that mediocre burger when there were still potentially hours between us and our next meal. He ate the sandwich half and finished the burger anyway: THAT is how hungry we were.

And the cherry beverage? I should’ve looked at the nutritional label instead of being swayed by an orchard’s name on the side, because nary a cherry ever touched it save for the ones printed on the label. It tasted like corn syrup cough syrup, and that’s being generous. That, we did not finish. So even if all of our national parks get stripped of their funding and they need to rely on tourism to survive, I doubt the new motto for Carlsbad Caverns is going to be “Come for the caverns, stay for the food!”. But seriously, come for the caverns, though.

*This may in fact mark the first time in the history of the world that a correct answer was found on yahoo answers, and now that I’ve called them out on some accidental correctness, they’ll probably delete it and replace it with an answer about how you can’t get pregnant if it’s a full moon and you rub your genitals with a mr clean magic eraser

**I ate a fuckton of those burgers during junior high/high school though, because I had bad taste and my gut wasn’t going to fill out my JNCOs all on its own.

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One Day in Santa Fe

May 15, 2017 Comments Off read Attractions, Masticating With Mellzah, Mountain, New Mexico, Travel, USA, West

Well, more like half a day. It was my birthday and I wanted to spend it in Santa Fe, eating delicious food and window shopping. My first stop was at Meow Wolf–I wouldn’t have had time to tackle The House of Eternal Return again, though I’ve heard there have been some changes since my last visit. There’s too much to see and it’s too well done to half-ass it. That, and I think every schoolkid in New Mexico was there that day which made it another hard pass, but I definitely wanted to browse through the gift shop as they have all kinds of neat stuff made by their artists. I ended up picking up a pair of earrings and Jason brought home a smaller plush replica of their space owl and after that, the shrieking reverberating around the lobby grew to be too much and we both beat a retreat back to the parking lot.

Our next stop was the Jackalope Mercado, a most excellent garden center/home decor/little bit of everything place. If we’d road tripped it to Santa Fe, I would have had a difficult time not packing the trunk full of pottery and mirrors and all the other stuff that would never fit in a carry-on/ would never survive being thrown onto and off of a plane. So we mostly browsed around, checking out their wares and their chubby, deeply suspicious prairie dogs. Because, yes, in addition to all that other stuff, they also have a few prairie dogs burrowing around, doing their prairie dog business. I also saw a kind of insect I’d never seen before, the hummingbird moth. They’re really neat and supposedly they summer all around the US, so maybe I’ll get lucky and attract some to my garden when my hummingbird/butterfly attracting flowers start blooming.

Post Jackalope, we checked into our hotel and started wandering around town, window shopping, checking out galleries, and occasionally getting pulled off the street into jewelry shops where we got to practice our best “That ring is only $17,000? What a bargain, I’m considering buying three” faces. Jason is better at it than me, I caught a glimpse at my reflection and what my eyebrows were doing could best be described as “confused and constipated” so I don’t think I fooled anyone. It’s especially hard to feign that kind of casual buying interest when the jewelry in question looks like it was rejected from Baublebar for being too ostentatious.

For dinner, I found myself back at The Shed, because while I COULD have tried something new, I wanted something that I knew would be out of this world delicious. This time, I got to sit out on the patio and enjoy my green and red chile smothered steak and enchiladas out in the sunshine. It was everything I’d been dreaming about the entire dreary winter and by itself made the entire trip worthwhile. Jason was also well pleased with his newborn size christmas-style burrito–all of these dinner photos? He took ’em. I was too busy chowing down.

After dinner, we had hit that 6pm magic hour where all the shops in Santa Fe simultaneously close, so we walked over to the Jean Cocteau Cinema. I’d checked their schedule the week before and had seen a magic show on the docket that looked interesting–I hadn’t wanted to plan the day around it so I didn’t prepurchase tickets, but I kept my fingers crossed that two would be available the day of. When we arrived, they had a few “showing now” posters up, but none were for a magic act. Confused, I inquired of the ticket seller what was playing that evening, and there was indeed a magic show and they did, in fact, have tickets.

Photo by Robin Dawes

The magician in question was Francis Menotti, a veteran performer so skilled at his trade that he is one of the rare few to have fooled Penn & Teller. His show was delightful in every sense of the word–he was funny, and kind, and really engaged the entire audience in a way that would have been vastly more difficult in a larger venue, but I would absolutely go see him again, regardless of the venue. In the rain, on a train, whatever. I don’t go to see magic shows often, but Francis’ show made me deeply glad that I had. I only wish there had been some more butts crammed in the seats for him–I know it’s easy to be a backseat business owner when I have zero skin in the game, but it still seems like even a couple of bucks’ worth of posters would at least let people passing by the cinema know what’s going on inside.

I wrapped up the day by grabbing a drink at the hotel bar, Secreto, and taking it out to the candlelit patio to read and savor the evening. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday, and there was still plenty of road trip time around New Mexico to come.

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