There were plenty of good omens at the start of our trip. Gasoline prices, which had flirted with the $4 a gallon mark all spring, took a sudden dive the week before our planned departure. Instead of $600 in fuel costs, we were looking at less than $500 (in Roswell, NM, we filled the tank for $3.29 a gallon. I kid you not). Other good omens included... well, that's about it. Hmm. Not so encouraging as I first thought.
On day 1, lunch was in San Angelo. Picnic sandwiches. Naturally, they got mixed up and I got stuck with the kids' bland sandwiches while they were stuck with mine of the "spicy" variety. Seeing as how this is a goofy Hollywood screenplay, I wolfed down the bland sandwiches without thinking, and the kids threw mine to the ducks, so nobody got to enjoy that picnic lunch. And on top of that, the first tour for Miss Hattie's Bordello Museum wouldn't begin for another hour, so we wrote off San Angelo and hit the road again. Next stop: Lubbock.
Now you might think to yourself that other than the Buddy Holly statue and a school crowned "Ugliest Campus in America" by Sports Illustrated back in 1984, there isn't much to see in Lubbock. But you'd be selling Lubbock short--who could forget the world-famous Prairie Dog Town?
I first visited Prairie Dog Town many moons ago, when I was a wee lad of maybe 7, but even then it struck me as odd how anyone would think it a good idea to build a golf course next to it. Unless they wanted every shot to be a hole in one. Thirty-something years later, not a lot had changed. Lots of prairie dogs. No burrowing owls this time, though, but a number of Mexican ground squirrels made up for the owls' absence. The kids found them entertaining. And there in the shade of the pavilion with wind blowing all around, we had dinner. No sandwiches this time, but Freebirds burritos all around (even Lubbock has improved in incremental steps over the decades, I suppose). And yes, happiness is indeed Lubbock in your rear-view mirror.
Over the next three hours, as we drove west into New Mexico, I saw more dust devils than I have in my entire life leading up to that point. It didn't hurt that every farmer along the way was plowing up the bone-dry fields (cotton having been harvested in the preceding weeks). We saw solo dust devils, in pairs and great swarms. Some were enormous. A few big ones swept over us as we drove, the hiss of red sand sliding over our windshield. We've get really familiar with that sound the next day. We made a quick detour in Fort Sumner to see the grave of Billy the Kid (or one of his graves, at any rate). Then we pushed on to Albuquerque, watching dust devils until nightfall.
By pure coincidence, we learned that my brother and his wife were in Moriarty, visiting her relatives. So we stopped and hung out with them for a while before crashing at a Best Western. They had sausage, biscuits and gravy for breakfast. It proved to be the best breakfast I'd have for the next week. The morning proved windy, and as we headed up to the Four Corners area, quite a bit of dust was filling the air. It made us long for the relative calm of the Dust Devils from the day before. Our actual foray to the Four Corners monument was a rushed affair, as the swirling wind tended to throw sand in your face no matter which direction you looked. The row of permanent vendor booths along the Colorado border was completely empty, the Utah row had only a few people selling souvenirs, and the New Mexico and Arizona rows were half-full at best. The wind was so bad the Native American jewelry and other wares were blown down to the ground time and again, and some vendors gave up and started packing even as we watched. It was wholly unpleasant. Yet it was about to get a whole lot worse.
We followed highway 162 into Utah, through Montezuma Creek, intending to come into Monument Valley from the north to get some iconic photos. Before we'd gone a dozen miles, however, the dust storm turned into a full-blown sandstorm. Grit pelted the car and the howling wind threatened to blow us off the road on occasion. Visibility dropped to a dozen yards at times. Waves of sand blew across the road like some supernatural fog, clouds rolling over us like a hazy surf. At one point, at a bend in the road where a flock of sheep had hunkered down on the open range to wait out the big blow, we stopped and got out, The Wife and I trying to capture the surreal scene photographically. We didn't last long, fleeing back to the shelter of the car with sand in our hair, our eyes, our ears, our teeth, our underwear... even the poor lenses on our camera had grit invade their focus and zoom rings. I'd heard that infrared photography is good at cutting through dust and haze for clear, sharp images under less than idea circumstances, but the photos above and below show that even infrared is pretty darn limited when sand takes to the skies.
Unbelievably, when we crossed the San Juan River at Mexican Hat, we saw a rafting expedition putting in right below the bridge. Considering our short-lived foray into the unprotected sandstorm an hour earlier (which hadn't lessened in severity in the interim) I could only imaging the misery of the rafters. If you've taken off work and chartered the rafting trip months earlier with non-refundable deposits, I suppose you've got no choice come rain, wind or sandstorm. In any event, our hopes for a evening of shooting iconic Monument Valley sunset photographs were rapidly dwindling. I'll share that experience in part 2.
A full gallery of road trip photos can be found here.
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 1
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 2
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 3
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 4
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 5
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 6
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 7
The 2011 Griswold Family Adventure pt. 8
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