Day 07 - Littlefield TX to Santa Fe NM

First let me say that I forgot to mention the prairie dogs from yesterday.  They were right by the road as we approached Littlefield and they were (you guessed it) prairie-dogging.  We saw probably 50 and Angela wanted to take all of them home.

This morning was in the mid-30's in Littlefield and that smell from yesterday was gone.  Not a whiff of it.  The wind must have changed directions.  As we left town, however, we came upon several more feed lots and the wind was blowing our way.  It is powerful stuff.  I don't know how those people do it.  Some of them have their houses right next to the feed lot. And they are nice houses. However they manage it, well... God bless them... cause I sure love a hamburger.

Weather over the past couple of days has been absolutely incredible and today was no exception.  They must have had a ton of snow recently, because it is still on the ground after several days of temps in the high 60's and 70's.  We hit the high 60's again today, even though we were in higher elevations.

We took US84 over to New Mexico and stopped at the state line Welcome Center - which was closed, but provided directions to the Clovis Chamber of Commerce.  We mainly wanted a big map of New Mexico.  We drove the 7 additional miles to Clovis (because it was on our way) and stopped at the Clovis Chamber of Commerce, which doubles as a museum for Norman & Vi Petty.  Norm and Vi were musicians, but Norm was most known as a record producer for Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings and others.  I learned all of that from Wikipedia because I wasn't going to fork over an entire $5 for a museum for people I never heard of.  Anyway... the whole state of New Mexico is out of the big New Mexico maps (per the representatives of the Clovis Chamber of Commerce).

We went back to the Ghia and found it didn't want to start.  BTW, we have found the non-starting pattern of the Ghia.  If we park facing down a hill, it fires right up.  Pull into a parking space or park at the bottom of the hill, and you'll need to push start it.  We elected to tour downtown Clovis and see if the problem would rectify itself (it didn't).  Despite being a major recording town at one point, the historic downtown district was dead or dying. There were a couple of real cool apartments/condos (http://www.tierrarealty.com/portfolio_shell.php?id=44#), but everything else was scary.  That prompted us to push the Ghia back out onto the main street of Clovis (which was dead) and then a quarter of a mile down the road until we got it started.  Didn't have a problem for the rest of the day.

From Clovis, we finally got on some real "back" roads.  These were state roads leading to Tucumcaria NM.  On my cross-country bicycle ride, we biked to Tucumcari and spent the night there.  The day we biked into Tucumcari was one of the most stunning routes of the trip; the day out of Tucumcari was my personal best day on the bike (an average 26.4mph for 100 miles).  I wanted to show Angela what it looked like.  You may have heard of Tucumcari.  The lyrics below are from a song named Willin' (performed by Little Feat and Linda Ronstadt):

I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty don't ya know, 
and I'm still, willin'
Out on the road late at night, 
Seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice
I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me, weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a signI'll be willin', to be movin'

We back-tracked along the road from Tucumcari to Las Vegas, New Mexico ("whoa" you say... there's a NEW Mexico?).  It is about 120 miles of incredible scenery - the pictures below don't do it justice.  The road is a little rough, but the speed limit is only 55mph - great speed for the VW. The road is so empty and there were hardly any other vehicles.

There is another vehicle in the picture - one of three that we saw over a 60-mile stretch.

This area is so desolate.  There will be a farm/ranch every once in while... but mainly just emptiness.  If you did live out there, it would be 40-50 miles or more to the nearest convenience store.  It would be a day trip to WalMart or Target.

It was out in the middle of this emptiness that we found a state park with a lake.  A dam was built in the middle of the depression and it created a small lake (the area is pretty dry).  We had the entire park completely to ourselves.  It was eerily quiet.

We continued onto Las Vegas NM.  We saw horses, cattle and a lot of bluebirds along the way.

Las Vegas was great,... but we decided to push on to Santa Fe to make up some time lost in Austin.