I regrouped at my motel room from the previous day. I calculated that I have to drive at least five hours if I want to make it to San Francisco by Friday evening. Five hours may not sound like a lot, but consider this - I can’t start driving until 11AM, because my body refuses; then there’s breakfast sometimes, depending on whether or not I have leftovers from the previous day; at some point I need to stop for lunch; I have to stop driving at about 7PM, because otherwise I’m stretching it on finding a place to sleep and a place to have dinner, and also, once I’m settled in a room I have a lot of work to do: for starters, this blog doesn’t write itself, you know. Then there’s some work I’m doing for Le Laboratoire, my previous employer; Then I’m preparing for a talk I’m giving next month in Israel, and a conference… so five hours of driving are actually hard to accomplish!
Luckily, this was a day when I had leftover pizza from the night before, so I didn’t have to stop for breakfast. 11AM and I was on my way to New Mexico.
New Mexico is beautiful. My favorite landscapes in this trip by far.
I arrived at Las Vegas - Not to be confused with THE Las Vegas in Nevada. I drove around and got to the historic town plaza, where a few artists were working on wood carved sculptures.
I grabbed some lunch and drove on, until I reached Santa Fe. I spent a lot of time there - I started by taking a lot of pictures of myself with a “city limits” sign, to show the members of the legendary Israeli band “The Flies”. They had a song with Santa Fe in the lyrics, so I just had to.
Near the sign there were some merchants, selling wood art, decorative stones, bushes and cacti (or “cactuses”, if you like. Or just “cactus”. Wikipedia says they all work).
One of them asked if I wanted to buy one of these posts as a souvenir from New Mexico. “How am I going to carry this?”, I responded automatically. They guy pointed at my truck. Yeah… I have a truck… “Oh, It’s full… and there’s no room in my apartment… next time, I promise, next time.”
I drove around Santa Fe, which is really pretty:
And then continued south. I passed Albuquerque and turned west. I then saw a sign that said that the I-40, the road I was on, was closed. I was already on a detour after the roads closed on me the day before. It seemed as if the interstate system did not want me to get to San Francisco. I texted Julia for help, because my phone is too slow and the reception was too bad for me to handle internet. Julia found out that the road is indeed blocked, but the closure was in Arizona, about 300 miles away from my location, so I was safe. I drove until I hit Grants, a tiny town on Route 66.
I got a room, ran to the only restaurant that was open to get food before they close, took some take-away food to my room, and since I wasn’t hungry, went straight to the only bar in town - “The Outlaws”.
There were only very few people, which was a shame - the space is really cool. At some point, a huge dude came in. He had a very round torso, bleached hair, black make up around his eyes, and he was wearing shorts and a striped polo shirt. He was a human version of Humpty Dumpty, including the gay mannerism. He was setting up his station to lead a karaoke. This I have to see, I thought. I went back to my room, ate, worked and talked to Julia for a while, and went back to the bar.
There was now a group of about ten people, all in their early twenties. Two girls were enormous, one of them heavily tattooed. Another girl was a slim, dark girl with a heavy Mexican accent. One of the guys was tall and slim and he wore his baseball cap backwards. The girls were choosing hip-hop songs that I didn’t know. Then Humpty put on a Mexican song and everybody got up and danced, including the tiny bartender. I was admiring how well they were all dancing - even the enormous girls looked like were floating.
And just as I was about to leave, thinking how this whole situation is a cliche of a small, southern town, they all went outside for a smoke, leaving the guys with the baseball cap alone on the dance floor, playing air guitar and signing Metallica.
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