Notes From New Mexico - Day Four

There's nothing quite as majestic or awe inspiring as a huge thunderstorm moving across a desert-scape - massive, rolling puffs of clouds tumbling and building to unimaginable heights - lightning simultaneously lethal and beautiful, the rain on desert smell that is like no other and always welcome.


Yesterday, after I dropped Willow in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she will attend a workshop and then move on to an ashram, I drove down the north-south IH 25 corridor through the massive valley that runs from Denver to Trinidad. To my right (west) was a front of thunderstorms rolling across the mountains and then into the valley where I was driving. Curtains of rain and daggers of lightning swept across the plateau putting on an endless, sometimes frightening, always entertaining show.

When it became apparent that I would be driving into the eye of the storm if I tried to make it all the way to Alamosa, Colorado, as was the plan, and with seven hours of driving already logged, I decided to pull over, in a driving rain, in Walsenburg, Colorado, and call it a day. Fortunately, I was able to get a Best Western room with wireless internet service. I used to pick motels if they had pay-per-view movies, now it's all about wireless internet.

After a fruitless, albeit brief trek through Walsenburg in search of food, I ended up with a gawd-awful meal from Carl's Jr., an establishment I would never frequent otherwise. There was one other Mexican food restaurant with lots of cars around it, but after three days of OD-ing on green chili, my stomach was begging for a reprieve - which Carl's Jr. was not.

I am looking forward to today because my drive from Walsenburg to Chama New Mexico, will take me back in the mountains and headed to my 6-day decamp at my friends' cabin (misnomer - it's larger than my house in Austin) on 50 acres of lush high-country. My best friend Deb (reference photo and video on this blog) is driving up from her home in Silver City, New Mexico to meet me. While there we will read, drink and eat too much but well, take a few road trips, fish for the trout in the stream that runs through the property, and try to destroy each other over gin (the game, not the beverage).

Until tomorrow....

SueAnn