Go West: Day Two

Not sleeping well combined with a time zone change meant I finding myself sitting in a Carlsbad, New Mexico hotel lobby at 5am, surfing the web on my laptop as the rest of the family (and denizens of Carlsbad) slept. A few hours later after partaking of the free breakfast buffet, we piled in the (now beginning to stink) silver bullet (gray minivan) and headed north to Roswell, New Mexico.

As a kid who grew up on Star Wars and UFO books, Roswell is a mecca of sorts. It is the site of, supposedly, a UFO crash back in 1947. Lest any visitors forget this fact, the entire town is covered with aliens (I was going to say “the kind from outer space and not the kind from south of the border,” but in reality, it’s probably both; I was only interested in the former.) There are wooden cut-out aliens standing in store fronts, giant statues towering above the entrance to KFC, posted atop the lamp posts, and painted on just about every available public-facing wall in town.

There are also aliens at the obligatory Roswell UFO Museum, which we visited. Through newspaper articles and replica artifacts, the museum walks visitors through the crash of either a space craft or a weather balloon (depending on whose version of the story you believe). Other parts of the museum display photographs of both the identified and unidentified variety. For the kids or the kitschy, there are plenty of fake aliens (including one being dissected) for photo opportunities.

After taking a full lap through downtown Roswell we headed northwest to Albuquerque, where we met up with my friend Paul and his family. After gifting us with a loaf of green-chili bread, letting our kids watch his kid’s pet snake eat, and checking out Paul’s computer and game room, Paul and his son Alex accompanied our family on a whirlwind tour of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

What I wanted to see at the museum was “STARTUP: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution.” Funded by Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), the exhibit had tons of old computers and computer artifacts on display. There was also a great movie that explained the early years of home computing, from the Altair to the release of the original Macintosh. I have seen original Apple I computers (the ones in garage-made wooden cases) before on display, but the museum had things like one of the original blue boxes made by Jobs. Now that’s cool.

Due to our progressive schedule (and my mockery of it by making an unscheduled stop in ABQ), I promised Susan we would spend no more than an hour in Albuquerque. After two-and-a-half hours in town, I was told it was time to go. After saying our goodbyes, we pulled out of the museum, made a right, and saw Little Anita’s.

The last time Susan and I visited Albuquerque together, which was in 1994, we ate at Little Anita’s. I thought it would be a shame if we didn’t eat there again, and so I made a command decision and decided right then and there it was time to eat dinner. At 4:30pm. In my defense, it was 5:30pm back home. Our “we’ll eat quickly and only stay for half an hour” meal quickly became a “I can’t believe how long this hour-and-a-half meal is taking” visit. Actually I don’t even know why I said “quickly” because nothing was quick about it. The restaurant was obviously understaffed. We had to wait ten minutes for a table when all we could see were empty tables (that should have been our first clue). Then, at least initially, we ended up with both a waiter and a waitress, both of which were confused about whose area we were sitting in and, apparently, by what we were doing there. One waitress took our drink order, then a waiter tried, then another waitress tried again. After staring at our menus for ten minutes we were ready to order food, but nobody took the hint. Then, after ordering, we stared for half an hour at a full cup of delicious salsa and an empty basket of chips. The food, when it arrived, was as delicious as we remembered it being almost twenty years ago, but something had definitely gone awry with the wait staff during our visit.

Pulling out of Little Anita’s, we hit I-40 west for five hours, driving directly into a strong headwind and reading signs warning us of “possibility of zero visibility ahead”. At times, the signs were right; the desert winds whipped sand and dust in all directions, giving the appearance of driving into a fog. With a car full of gas and bellies full of beans, there was nothing left to do but drive, and drive, and drive.

We got to the hotel last night at 1am Oklahoma time, which turned out to be 11pm Arizona time. We slept in a two-root suite; the kids got their own beds in their own room, and were too tired to fight. Due to the now two-hour time zone difference, everybody woke up around 5:30am. Kids are showering and getting dressed. In about an hour we’ll be heading to the train station to begin our eight-hour train-led tour of the Grand Canyon.