Week of June 21-27 - Special Moving CJ and Ashley to Las Vegas Edition! Part II

If I told you, Dear Readers, that I had been to a place so incongruous to the rest of our great nation that I well and truly believed that I was in a different country, you might think of me as simply being awed at the great big world out there. If I told you that I had been to a place that was almost so inhospitable and seemingly unfriendly as to make me want to turn around and drive back home, you might think that I have an uneducated and geocentric view of the world. But, what if I told you that I had traveled through a place that was as dry and barren as the surface of the moon, a place where the vegetation is made up almost exclusively of squat, ugly bushes that eventually get so bored that they gnaw off their own roots and attempt to roll away. A place where the few towns all have more derelict building than habitable ones, where axe murders surely live, and place that even the sun seems to hate as told by the unending scorch that parches the ground even after the sun has set in the rest of the country. Then, the more traveled among you Dear readers would nod to yourselves and say “He’s been to western Texas.”

And that is exactly where this portion of our adventure takes off. If you recall, our intrepid band of travelers have just left from Arlington on our way to Albuquerque, and there is no way to make such a trek without passing through west Texas, which is always, shall we say, an event. This time doubly so because we left the relative safety of the Interstate system and instead took a State Road which exposed us to all manner of unique sights, such as the It’ll Do Motel (that’s the actual name) and an establishment where you could get your oil changed, but some real pit BBQ and have you horse re-shoed. How many places on earth offer so many services in the same building? Not many, I’ll wager. As an added bonus, the Texas Department of Transportation was conducting random repairs on sections of the road, so for a large part of the time traffic was funneled into one lane going either direction, which is all the more exciting at night in a big ‘ol truck. Add to that the freak windstorm that kicked up and for about an hour tried as hard as it could to blow CJ and I into oncoming traffic, and you have yourself a grand time in west Texas! The girls in the car had it little easier, as with Brookie at the helm the wind sent a herd of marauding tumbleweeds into the road. When we pulled over for gas in Amarillo, I pulled the remains of one of the less fortunate tumblers out of the grill of the car. The one good thing about all the construction was the wealth of Work Zone signs that sprouted along the way, they made short work of two of the more difficult letters in the Alphabet game. We finally reached Albuquerque (a city name that is far more fun to say than to type) at about 3 in the morning. We were fortunate enough to come in over a hill and got to see the whole city lit up like a blanket of coals after a campfire. Far more dramatic in my opinion than Chattanooga.

Once again, upon reaching the hotel CJ and I were in charge of parking the beast while the girls checked in. Once in the room we pretty much all crashed because in the morning, we were going to the zoo! Actually, more than a zoo, it was the Albuquerque Biological Park, Botanical Gardens, Aquarium and Rio Grande Zoo. After a brief bout of getting lost, we found the zoo (I know, more than a zoo, but I refuse to type all that again) and bought our tickets. A scant $12 bought us admission to the aforementioned nature complex and a ride on a train from the aquarium and gardens to the zoo. This particular train was scaled somewhere between the train at Disney World and that train they have in the mall around Santa’s Workshop. It also ran on a schedule devised by someone with a cruel sense of humor. As I understood it, the train would stop at our station every hour on the quarter to the hour except if it was heading to the zoo, when it would only stop every hour on the quarter past the hour, and all this was dependent upon whether there were actual people at the train stop, and then it wouldn’t come at all. Eventually it did show up, and we rode our merry way to the zoo, which I am happy to say was far bigger than I expected to get for only $12 admission. Besides the traditional zoo attractions like elephants and giraffes and baboons and hyenas (who have a very straightforward method of deciding Alpha male) there were also all manner of big cats, birds of prey, and even polar bears. I bet those bears are wondering to this day who thought Albuquerque, which happens to be located very close to western Texas and suffers from the sun’s wrath, was a good place to park a pair of polar bears. I was thoroughly impressed with the sheer number of animals on display. The real reason we came to this zoo in particular was the opportunity to ride a camel. That’s right, one of the things you can do in Albuquerque is ride a camel, and when we eventually did find the camels to ride, Brooke rode a camel with all the enthusiasm of a kid of Christmas morning, and took to it with the skill of a Bedouin. I’m pretty sure for her that made the whole trip worth it. After we left the zoo we were all in that bad place you go to when you’re really hungry but don’t have an idea about what you want to eat or where you’ll find it. We eventually ended up in a Bennigan’s type place and found ourselves in the middle of a Cold War between the waitress, who was very nice, and a woman from a drink company who kept coming over and offering to sell us drinks and had the IQ of an eggplant. After dinner and a quick stop for gas, we were on our way to Williams, Arizona, the Gateway to the Grand Canyon!

One final note about Albuquerque: Weird Al’s description was spot on, except that the air did not smell like warm root beer. That was kind of a let down.