Weekend Assignment #203: Road Trip!

My suitcase is packed, more or less, and mere minutes from now I'll be driving to Los Angeles for the weekend. I'm already running a little behind, because after I picked up my rental car I had to go back to work to rush out a report due tomorrow morning. You know what happens if you stay too late in my building? Apparently you get locked in. There was a way out, but it required at least a mile's walk to get back to the rental car, because of fences and washes and things.

One of the dinosaurs of Cabezon, California

Still, the time has come: I'm getting the heck out of Tucson, ba kep och ma vere*, driving away in a nice new car with satellite radio. Which brings me to the new Weekend Assignment question:

Weekend Assignment #203: If you had the time, money, housesittter, etc. to pack up right now and drive somewhere out of town for a few days, where would you go, if anywhere? Note I said driving, so wherever you pick should be in driving distance.

Extra Credit: last time you got out of town for non-business reasons, what was your mode of transportation?

A Dalek and me at Gallifrey One, 2004.

Obviously my destination for this particular weekend is all set: I'm going to the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, CA, there to consort with Daleks and Time Lords and other aliens - or, to be more accurate, people who have either written about such characters or played them on tv. In the first years of this convention my former writing partner and I used to interview such people, first for TARDIS Time Lore and then for Starlog, but this time I'm "a civilian," as John put it. I sure would love to interview Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell, though. They're two of my three favorite Doctor Who writers of all time, the third being Douglas Adams. Yes, that Douglas Adams.

But there are lots of other places in easy reach by car, and I don't get out of town nearly often enough. I'd love to go down to Bisbee, Arizona with John for the weekend. We'd stay one night at the historic Copper Queen hotel, another at a funky trailer park thing with a midcentury diner and themed coaches to stay in. We'd probably shoot for the Tiki-themed one. We could make a day trip from there to Tombstone, to see whether Morgan Earp still falls over with an audible clack at the Historama. And I say that with love, because Tombstone is a great little place.

I'm also dying to see Roswell, NM, not because I believe anything much happened there but because of all the kitch that's grown up because of what people think happened. Or to the Grand Canyon, to try out that new walkway. ride a mule and finally visit the North Rim (not this time of year, though).

Or we could just go to Disneyland for the 11th time or thereablouts. That works, too.

And yes, every recent trip I've made has been by car: to Sedona and Los Alamos (2006), to Disneyland (2005, twice), to the Nebula Awards Weekend in Tempe (2006), to meet my friend Sarah IRL in Scottsdale (also 2006), and to meet John Scalzi, also in Scottsdale (2007). But I wouldn't be opposed to a trip by train or airplane, given enough time and money.

Your turn: here's $500 and a prepaid car rental. Where are you going? Write up the answer in your blog or journal, and leave a link in the comments to this entry. I'll be back in a week (assuming the Daleks don't get me) with a roundup of your answers.

Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to pack up my laptop and hit the road!

Karen

*Loosely translates to "Get me the heck out of here!" From a scene I wrote over 30 years ago.

End of the Road Trip, and Preparations for Another

It's time to finish up my series about my trip to New Mexico two weekends ago, and to tell you what I think I'm doing tomorrow.


This picture is pretty representative of what I saw for a good part of that last day of driving, Monday along US 60, before I got back on I-25 South, bound for I-10 and home. The road itself was mostly straight, mostly flat, but with mountains in the distance on both sides. A lot of Arizona is like that, too.


This is one of three buildings of a derelict business in the middle of nowhere on US 60.

Here's more of the same place - not "Water Can," but "Water Canyon Lodge."

Magdalena again. This time it's the former train station. A lot of the late 19th century railroad stations in this part of the country looked like this.


And here is the sightseeing destination I was making for with all that driving on US 60. It's the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 large dish antennas laid out more or less in a giant Y shape. The combination of movable antennas makes for a much larger, more sensitive device for picking up the relatively weak radio signals from space than would be possible with a single, very large antenna. A system of what amounts to railroad tracks is used to move the antennas as needed to follow the signals of current interest.

The VLA is about fifty miles out from Socorro, and by the time I got there it was too late to catch the gift shop open. Too bad. I would definitely have made a purchase.

The reason I wanted to buy something at the gift shop is that it's impossible to really get a good look at the VLA at ground level. You can't really see all of the antennas at once, even when they're all around you, much less make out the pattern in which they're arranged. In fact, it probably took me close to an hour to find the side road that led to the visitor center. Even that was kind of interesting, though, as I drove to the entrance of an elk refuge (?!) and down a dirt road to somebody's farm. And of course, leaving the area that late in the afternoon probably made my encounter with the pronghorns possible, or at least more likely.

When I eventually made it back to I-25, I started to notice that the interstate was parallel to the Rio Grande. A narrow part of this river was up in Los Alamos with me - well, below it, anyway. The really wide part is the Texas-Mexico border. It was the section in between that I was following now.



Just after sunset, I came upon the Hatch exit off I-25, leading to NM 26, billed as a shortcut to I-10 via Deming. For the last twenty minutes, I-25 had been veering east, definitely not the direction I wanted. So I took the shortcut. It was the hypotenuse of the triangle, and probably saved me many miles. Even so, the shortcut was not short! It was nearly fifty miles, mostly on curving two-lane highway, behind at least one other vehicle. I think there were six vehicles immediately in front of me by the time I reached Deming.

Once I got to Deming, fabled home of the duck races, I tracked down the steak house I'd seen advertised on a billboard a hundred miles before. If you ever find your way to Deming, I recommend Rancher's Grill. The steak itself was just okay, but it came with corn and great mashed potatoes, and a soup and salad bar. Yum!

From Deming to Tucson turned out to be only a couple of hundred miles. Frequent warnings about winds and dust storms were not accompanied by any serious winds or dust storms, and the construction zones were no big deal. At roughly 75 mph, I was home by midnight, almost to the minute.

Now, about tomorrow. This is the weekend of the Nebula Awards, handed out by the SFWA. This used to stand for Science Fiction Writers of America, but now it means Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. I expect to be a member someday. Anyway, this weekend the SFWA is giving its Grand Master Award to my old acquaintance and matchmaker, Harlan Ellison. I haven't seen him in a few decades, but I did speak to him on the phone a couple of times last year. And the ceremony and related events are in Tempe, a suburb at the near end of the Phoenix megalopolis.

If I get up early in the morning, I can attend a reception, followed by readings by numerous writers, and a panel with Harlan on it in the late afternoon. I can't afford the banquet, but I can theoretically attend the awards ceremony. All this for $50 + gas + driving time. There seem to be no obvious opportunities to market my writing to agents or editors.

Is it worth it, just to see "Hello" and "Congratulations!" to Harlan, attend readings by writers whose work I haven't read, attend a panel or two, and hear Harlan's speech at the award ceremony? I kind of think so. Then again, I wanted to get a good night's sleep first. It's past 2 AM now. I will probably decide that sleep is more important than the reception, but I'm not quite sure about the rest of it. I'll have to decide when I'm conscious again.

On the sleep thing: yes, I know that dreaming takes place during REM sleep, and that it takes a while to get there. Two hours would probably have done it, but it took me a long time to actually get to sleep last night. If I remember correctly, REM becomes a proportionately larger part of the sleep cycle in the course of a full night's sleep. Unfortunately, I seldom get a full night's sleep, which is why I occasionally get hypnogogic effects - stray thoughts and waking dreams, such as the brief impression - not a hallucination, just a mental image - of a fleeing woman. Earlier today I was obsessed with the linguists' pet phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." I've worked out how it's possible to sleep furiously, but the colorless green ideas are trickier.

See what you miss out on, having a brain that's functioning on adequate sleep? And do you understand why I'm blowing off the morning reception to sleep in?

Yeah, I knew you would.

Karen

Update: I misread the online program. There's nothing much going on in the morning anyway. I can sleep until noon without a scheduling conflict!

Saturday afternoon: okay, I'm going, leaving now. And I've updated the entry below this one with a dream. Excelsior!

Technorati Tags: Photos, Travel, SFWA, New Mexico, personal, Harlan Ellison, Writing, Tucson

The Road to Kelly

Three and a half miles from the town of Magdalena, New Mexico, according to this historic marker, is a ghost town called Kelly. I had seen it on a few maps, but had not decided to go there. When I read on the marker how close it was, though, I could not resist!

The road to Kelly starts out a normal, wide, paved road, with an unnecessarily constrained speed limit of 25 MPH. One of the houses on the left has a sign offering a "Kelly Mine Pass" for sale, but that seems a bit too intense for this little side trip of mine. I drive on. After about a mile, though, perhaps less, the paved road turns into what one might call a dirt road. Dirt is only part of what's there, though. It's mostly loose bits of rock - loose shale, I want to call it, but I don't know whether that's right.



After a while I come across some unlabeled bits of brick that might be some kind of mine works, or building foundations, or neither. It seems too soon to be the ghost town, so I drive on. Shortly after that I come to a fork in the road. There's a little yellow sign with the number 103 (301? I forget) on the right fork. I turn right.

This is a mistake. The road winds past ranches and remote private homes. The rough road is shaking my poor car unmercifully, even at 10 to 20 MPH. Eventually I turn around in a driveway that's still being bulldozed a few feet away. Perhaps 50 yards farther on, a woman in a car is talking to someone in another car. I wait for her, and ask directions.

She turns out to be very nice, professionally dressed and with a smallish terrier in the front seat with her. The woman tells me that the ghost town is on the left fork, and impossible to miss from there. I follow her down to the fork. She waits for me to make sure I know where to go from there.



Peggy Lee's Is That All There Is? plays on my car stereo as I struggle over the rough road, ironically a little less horrific for the car than the fork that leads to places where people still live. I eventually come upon an intact church (St. John the Baptist Catholic Church) on the right hand side of the road. I park there, and take the last half mile or so on foot - very carefully. Spraining an ankle yet again would be a disaster in a place like this!



Aside from the church, there are no intact houses or businesses left, just foundations. Ghost towns on tv are usually full of weatherbeaten but intact wooden buildings, but I have yet to see one like that in real life. Kelly is much more typical of the ones I've seen. Yeah, Peggy. Is that all there is to a ghost town?



But up ahead I see a sign: Kelly Mine. I struggle on.




Soon I see mine works, this time for sure, off to the left of the sign. I pass a barrier meant to stop cars from going further, and walk a little closer to the mine works for a picture or two.


I have no idea what any of this stuff did in its day, but Kelly was a silver mine, and later a source of zinc carbonate for paint. A web page promoting the mine pass says that over 80 minerals have been cataloged here, including smithsonite, whatever that is. (I assume it has something to do with the fellow whose endowment got the Smithsonian started.) The page also say that the metal bit above, the "steel headframe," was designed by Alexander Eiffel back in the 1880s!

I do not approach the mine works any closer than necessary to get a good shot with the zoom setting on the camera. Then I turn and start back down, slowly, carefully. I'm almost back to my car when a truck pulls up, containing, based on appearances, a rancher and his lady friend.

"Need a lift?"

"No thanks. I'm almost back to my car."

"Oh, that's your car. We're going to drive to the end and come back. You can ride along if you like."

I decide to take no further chances on this little adventure. "No thanks. Have a good day!"

And that is that. I get back to the car and head back to Magdalena.

Still at least one installment to go, folks!

Karen

Technorati Tags: Travel, Old West, New Mexico

Enter the Marshalls

Today was a sleeping-in day, a BBC Doctor Who day (the return of Sarah Jane Smith!), and a day when I should have done more cleaning than I did. I just got the second installment of The Jace Letters posted, updated the sidebar of my fiction blog, and set up my entry template for the Jace and Sandy emails instead of the Heirs of Mâvarin excerpts. Now it's after 2 AM, so as usual I'm short on time to write tonight's Outpost entry properly. Oh, well.

On Monday, April 24th, I drove from Socorro, New Mexico all the way back to Tucson, Arizona. But I didn't do so right away! For one thing, I overslept; for another, I was determined to have one more adventure before arriving home. I decided to so see the Very Large Array radio telescope, roughly 60 miles west of Socorro on U.S. 60. Halfway there, I stopped off for lunch at a little town (probably a village, technically) called Magdalena. From what I've read, it's named after a rock formation on one of the nearby mountains, which looked to someone like Mary Magdalene. I have no idea how a mountain can remind you of the physical appearance of a woman who wasn't visually described much in the Bible, but that's the story.

Anyway, Magdalena is the only settlement of any size between Socorro and the VLA. Beyond that is Datil, and then Pie Town, and hundreds of miles later, Show Low, Arizona, I think. I didn't go home that way, but I'm pretty sure that's what I saw on an atlas later in the day.

The first thing I noticed about Magdalena, aside from the reduced speed limit and a couple of possible places to eat, was an historical marker, just one of many along this stretch of US 60. This one was about a nearby ghost town called Kelly. (More on this tomorrow night.) After I checked that out, I returned to Magdalena and took some pictures. Here's the sight that really got my attention:


Yes, it's the marshall's office, looking pretty much exactly as it may have looked a century ago or more. The main difference now is the marshall and deputies park their cars in front of it instead of their horses.

After photographing the marhsall's office, I decided to check out this place on the other side of the main drag (U S 60):


Obviously, the town's bank was here once upon a time. If the marshall's office was always where it is now, that must have been pretty handy for deterring robberies. As I took this picture, I heard one of the marshalls (or deputies, or whatever) pull over an SUV for speeding. I guess the marshall's office is still in a convenient location for the work these guys do!


Even more interesting to me than the word Bank on this building were the words "cafe" and "FOUNTAIN." Was I interested in having lunch at a soda fountain? You betcha! I parked on the side street, missed the main entrance, walked past the front window and entered at the kitchen. Oops!


Inside, just as I'd hoped, was a lot of old junk from the little restaurant's history, or at least the town's history. I won't swear to you that none of the old soda bottles, local photos and clippings, Coke trays and other old stuff were collected from elsewhere, but it seems clear that this cafe, in one form or another, has been in the old Bank building for quite some time, perhaps half a century or longer.

The kid who served me was very modern, though, just slightly Goth and wearing a lip stud. I ordered a tortilla burger with chili. It was very good, but I must have misread the menu. What I got was a tortilla with a hamburger on it, plus a little cup of sliced chile peppers, not chili con carne or chili with beans. I don't eat chiles, ever, but it was in interesting mistake to make!

A couple of minutes after I sat down, two marshalls' vehicles parked next to mine, thus proving that I apparently had parked legally. I'd been a little nervous that I might not be. Three marshalls (or deputies) came in, looking like any other sheriff's deputies. They sat together a few tables away, and the kid with the stud immediately waited on them. I was ready for my check, but didn't mind waiting while the KWAS took care of the local law first.

Back outside, I noticed something aboout the cafe and former bank building that I'd missed before. It should have been obvious. Only the small part of the building where the cafe is remains an intact, working building. The rest is a boarded-up facade with no roof, open to the sky. I'm grateful that even part of the building yet survives!



Tomorrow: the road to Kelly.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Travel, Old West, New Mexico

Holy Exhibit B: Los Alamos

Here's the second part of my Round Robin entry for the topic "Holy," posted just a little late. I could have gotten it in sooner, but instead I got caught up reading a long thread about fanfic on Making Light. Sorry! Onward....

Last night we looked at Sedona, Arizona, and the way a red rock mesa can inspire people to very different paths in considering what is holy, the how, the who and the why. For some people, all that beauty is nothing more than the happenstance of faulting and folding. Others see a Maker behind the process, operating directly or indirectly. Still others imbue the rocks themselves with mystical properties.

The exterior of Jacob's church pays tribute to

natural beauty with a man-made waterfall.

People in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by and large, seem to take a more orthodox approach to such things.

Exhibit B: Los Alamos, Then and Now

As you may recall, the reason for my trip to New Mexico last weekend was to witness my 9-year-old godson's First Communion in the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, I extended the trip a bit so I could hack around a bit on the way there and on the way back. But really, the point of the exercise was to see Jacob for the first time in about four years, and to fulfill my role as his godmother.

Jacob (left) prepares to receive the Eucharist for the first time.

So I bought Jacob a few little things at the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, and headed out to Los Alamos. Jacob's reaction to the little religious cards and medal was classic: "I have just the box to put these in!" Good thing I brought the Aragorn figure as well.

Jacob and his certificate, memento of the day. The pastor reported
that one child hoped to stop sinning after receiving Communion.

Anyway, Sunday morning came, and I struggled to get to the church on time, having been up most of the night. Jacob's parents had given me a map and directions, though, and I thought I could make it in the fifteen minutes I had to get there. Unfortunately, map reading is not my strong suit, because I have trouble following spatial relationships. So I got within a block of the Catholic church, which is within a block of the Methodist church and the Episcopal church and probably at least one more similar site. I stopped in front of the Methodist one, parked, stared at the map, stared at the other buildings in every direction (except where I should have been looking), and went over to the school parking lot next door to ask directions.

"It's right across the street," a coach and one of his students told me. "Follow the cars that are turning in."

This made sense. After all, I had just followed another car all the way from White Rock, guessing that one church or another was the other vehicle's destination. And it was true: there was a line of cars across the street, turning in next to a church building as modern-looking as the new St. Ann's church building in Manlius when they first built it in the late 1960s. I got in line with the rest of the cars and SUVs, drove into the parking lot, and looked for a parking space. There were none left! I ended up parking on a bit of dirt just above a cliff, and arrived in church just a minute or two late.

A life-size crucifix dominates the church's modern interior

Now, the point of all that explanation is this: Jacob's church, Immaculate Heart of Mary, is a rather large church for such a small city, certainly larger than St. Michael's here in Tucson. It's one of more than thirty religious institutions in Los Alamos. New Mexico almost certainly has a relatively high percentage of Roman Catholics compared to other states, but one would not necessarily expect that in Los Alamos. Los Alamos is essentially a town of researchers and government contractors, with a bit less of an Hispanic influence than is seen elsewhere in the state.

More than that, Los Alamos is a town of scientists and their families. It's a town of physicists and engineers, a geek town, where the attendees of a post-Eucharist picnic have all heard of Doctor Who. I dare you to match that sf geek quotient at church socials elsewhere! This is a town where everyone works at the lab, or in some service or support capacity such as retail. Even in the Mass I attended, the pastor told an engineer joke in the course of his sermon.

"So what?" you may be asking. "What has any of that to do with being holy?"

To which I answer: remember what happened in Los Alamos in the early 1940s. This was the home of the Manhattan Project, were Robert Oppenheimer et al developed the atomic bomb. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Jacob's dad works, is essentially the same facility that was started for that purpose, all those years ago. Nowadays the research is more diverse and less problematic, but I'm sure that some ethical dilemmas remain, as they do everywhere. Did the original scientists at "Site Y" need their churches and synagogues to maintain their perspective, and avoid feeling the opposite of holy because of what they were doing? I don't know the answer, but I'm guessing that this may have been true for some of them.

As for today's physicists and engineeers and the rest, they certainly don't seem to be straying far from the religious mainstream with their Catholic and Methodist and other well-attended churches. Oh, there may be some atheists, New Agers and Wiccans in the mix somewhere, but that's not the impression I got, driving around Los Alamos on a Sunday morning. Here are people who do all sorts of cutting edge scientific stuff, and then go off to church, send their kids for religious instruction, receive Holy Communion and so on. I'm sure that if I'd been there early on a Friday evening, I'd have seen the same basic behavior from the lab's Jewish contingent and their families.

Jacob and some of the other kids after Mass.

What does it prove, if anything? Empirically, nothing at all. But it does show that for many people, science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and that traditional religious expressions can be as important a part of life as the scientific method. I think that's as it should be. As I read somewhere recently, science and religion don't have to be in conflict, because they are there to answer different questions. Science is about what and how. Religion is about who and why.

Karen

See the entry below this one for an updated linking list to this Round Robin Photo Challenge.

Technorati Tags: Photos, Religion, Holy, Round Robin Photo, New Mexico, personal, ethics

Animal Demonstrations

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of yourself (or someone you know) reproducing one (or more!) of moods in the AOL Journals Mood Menu.

Scalzi reminds up that the options are: Happy, Mischievous, Worried, Silly, Surprised, Flirtatious, Silly, Ecstatic, Frustrated, Loopy, Embarrassed, Hopeful, Anxious, Sad, Quiet and Chillin'.

I actually got home at midnight, but silly, me, I've just spent over 2 1/2 hours editing today's 146 photos. Now I've got to rush this entry and get to bed, so I can get up and work in the morning!

Okay: selected moods demonstrated by my new friends in New Mexico, the band of Pronghorns grazing on the plateau that contains the many parabolic dish antennae of the Very Large Array radio telescope:

Flirtatious (or possibly Surprised)

Anxious (to get away from me, anyway)

Chillin' (I hate that term)

And here are a few more, demonstrated by my bunny (Eastern Cottontail) friends at the Very Large Array:

(Vewy Vewy) Quiet


Worried (about the woman with the camera)

To be honest, I've always felt AOL's range of moods is rather limited. Where is Curious? Creative? Tired? Reluctant? Angry? The LiveJournal list is much more extensive, and I use it, when I get around to posting there at all. The AOL one, which I abandoned after about a month, is in serious need of an upgrade. Perhaps it will get one.

Of couse, Blogspot doesn't even have a formal mood system. I don't miss it.

Tomorrow night I do my just post-midnight Round Robin entry for the topic "Holy." As you may have guessed, my photos for it will be from the New Mexico trip. After that, I'm sure I'll have several more entries until I get caught up with it all, featuring

• a ghost town and abandoned mine
• a real wild west town with real marshalls
• a site too big to see (but I tried)
• a grand river

...and whatever else I happen to think of as I go through my pictures. Good night!

Karen


Technorati Tags:: Monday Photo Shoot, Scalzi, Moods, Bunnies, Wildlife, New Mexico