Sunday, fresh from our fabulous hike at Cochise Stronghold, we packed up everything and headed out of Dodge. It was a reasonable day as driving days go, only about 5 hours, including a looooong lunch break in Silver City, New Mexico.
SC is one of those places that time forgot, full of aging hippies (we felt quite at home) and historical artifacts.
Such as the one time home of Billy the Kid.
Mr. T is 5' 10" or so, guess Billy was a shorty. Talk about the Small Man Syndrome.
And just up the street.....
In 1887 (or somewhere in that era), there was a serious rainfall in the area with major flooding. This is the last house standing (as it were) after the floodwaters receded. Now a trendy B&B for aging hippies.
From SC, we moved on to Truth or Consequences, known locally (and on many highway signs, for obvious reasons) as T or C. The town is home to many hot springs hotels which you might expect to attract a sizeable clientele (baby boomers moving into the age of aches and pains and all that), but for some reason is still a pretty hurting place. Or maybe it's just because it's January and daily highs are only in the 15-20C range.
Dropping into the local coffee shop, The Black Cat, for the first decent cup of coffee we'd had in a month, we got talking with the server, a woman from..... Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Her brother from Saskatoon had arrived the previous day for a short visit. Small world, non?
Onwards and upwards to Elephant Butte State Park. After a (mostly pretty homely) nature walk in the desert, we headed to the lake to check out the boats. Elephant Butte Lake has been created by damming the Rio Grande. Or maybe that's damning the Rio Grande. At 36,000 acres, EB Lake basically guarantees the Rio Grande is virtually non-existent on the downstream side. The lake is a major recreation area. Think boats. Big ones. Lots of them. The woman in the Visitor centre told us that last July 4th there were 140,000 people in the park, most of them in large boats dragging things. And people.
Since we had some time in hand, we decided to do our lookie-loo thing and drive around the residential areas. What's really amazing about a lot of American towns is the wide variation in the types of houses you see in any given area. For example, you might have a really nice place, like this one (well, other than the power pole):
And right next door, you have......
A whole row of units like this....
It's all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
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