New Mexico

My wife and I took a trip to New Mexico in April 2009. She was writing a story that took place in Roswell. To get there we drove 14 hours straight (which is, I think, the longest I have ever driven). The trip down was mostly uneventful, although we did encounter a zero visibility dust storm and got a small taste of the poverty that is present on Native American reservations when I stopped for gas. The pumps were old-fashioned and when I went inside to pay the power went out right after my card went through. The gas station worker wasn't even fazed, it seemed like a fairly regular event. As we approached Roswell there were hundreds of jackrabbits on the side of the road. It was night and I was worried about hitting one, so I turned on my brights whenever other cars weren't around. Fortunately we made it through without killing any.

The weather in Roswell is interesting. Fortunately we were there in April, I think it would have been miserably hot during the summer. Every day at about 11:00am the wind would start blowing and it wouldn't stop until the next morning. My wife and I tried to get out of the car a few times and when we both opened our doors it turned our vehicle into a wind tunnel and papers and garbage started to blow out. We got in the habit of getting out one at a time to avoid that problem. My neighbor and oldest daughter's violin teacher is from Roswell (she actually took a trip there at the same time we did) and said that in the summertime living in Roswell is like “living in a dryer.” I can only imagine :)

The street lights in Roswell look like alien heads. My wife and I went to the UFO museum and were a little disappointed as it was mostly newspaper clippings and wasn't as interesting as we had hoped it would be. I have a theory about the “UFO” that landed, I think it was a failed U.S. or Russian attempt at putting a satellite into space. When it “crashed” near Roswell the truth was classified, and it was never declassified later because it would destroy Roswell's tourism industry. It's just a theory. Oh, and we went to some really tacky souvenir shops, too.

We mostly wanted to learn about the college in Roswell, because that's where a lot of my wife's book takes place. So we visited the school starting with the dorms. We told the people there that we were thinking about having our kids attend the school (it was just a little white lie …) and wanted to learn about it. They were all very friendly and gave us much more information than we wanted. After visiting the dorms we went to the school and took a tour. We walked pretty far (there are a lot of buildings).

We stayed at the Motel 6, which wasn't very nice but it was the only hotel with vacancy (I thought, wrongly, that it wouldn't be hard to get a hotel at the last minute in a town like Roswell). I think we stayed there two nights, then we went to Carlsbad Caverns, which was a pretty cool place. I was a little confused, though, about where to find the caves. We stopped at the visitor's center and did some shopping, then got back in our car and started driving to Carlsbad Caverns (or so I thought). I am used to Utah-style national parks where you pay an entrance fee and then drive 20 miles to see things. It turns out that the visitor's center is built on top of Carlsbad Caverns, and you take a 700+ foot elevator ride to get down to the caves. So we didn't need to leave the visitor's center at all!

After that we drove to Farmington and stayed there for our last night. On the way there we encountered a pretty bad snow storm (we were going through the mountains). I drove 10 or 15 miles per hour and was quite nervous because visibility was so poor. We stopped at a gas station and I asked them about the road ahead. They said it would be bad for a few more miles, then we would see a casino and the roads would be fine after that. And they were exactly right. As soon as we saw the casino the snow turned to rain and we were able to make it to Farmington safely. Our hotel there was a little nicer than the Roswell Motel 6, and the following day we stopped at the four corners area then finished driving home. It was a memorable and fun trip.