Road Trip to New Mexico - The Why of It

We are back from our big road trip to New Mexico. I took a lot of photos with my phone and put some on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/mbdanielson/  Len took even more photos with his Nikon. I want to post some of them, but I need to learn how to do that more easily. Currently it is as simple as washing a cat.

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Road trips are awesome. And awful. It took us three days to drive 1500 miles to New Mexico, three days to drive home. While we were there we drove an extra 600 miles, here and there.

Here is why we love road trips. Because one doesn’t know what’s around the next corner or over the next hill. Gas stations are parachute drops into a culture that exists no place else. Two-minute conversations with people one will never see again; people who are kind and laughing or bitter and rude. Young males hauling 36-packs of Buds to their trucks. Old people with sensible shoes pulling themselves slowly out of sensible cars, groaning and stretching. Or the people climbing into gigantic motor homes; those homes catch wind and waver crazily in front of us as they sail wide mesas and skinny mountain passes. Professional truck drivers, in and out. 

We drove into New Mexico on US 40 from Oklahoma City. We’d been driving since 8AM and it was early evening. We'd already waited out a terrific rainstorm at a rest area. Now we were driving fast and intently, hoping to get to Santa Fe by dark. Turned north on 285 and came up over a low rise – and before us was all of creation, rimmed by purple mountains. Swaths of evening light falling across the land. What was in front of us was as quiet and wild as earth can be. We both uttered a “Wow.”

And that is why we drive. Because, yes, one pays a lot of highway - and in return gets back surprises and beauty and wows. It humbles you. It tells you, by the weary seat of your pants and low ache in your back, just how enormously big this country is. It tests your relationship to the other person or people in the car. A road trip is a way to be oneself in a different venue. Sometimes the new place you explore is your own self.

Driving into Santa Fe at dusk

The blue mesas. In the 1980's Len and I often ate at a restaurant called The Blue Mesa (on Halsted) and it wasn't until this trip that I understood why they named it that. 

The sun setting in the west lights the mountains for a few moments.