Day 2, From Aliens to Bottomless Pits

In case you haven’t figured it out from my older blog entries, The Coach and I spend a lot of time in our car when we go on a vacation. For us, it’s about the journey: eating “local” food, seeing kitsch, stopping at nature sites [1].  This trip is no different. When we started planning the trip last month [2], we decided on taking a nuclear family vacation. We’d go back to Los Alamos, we’d see the missile museum near Las Cruces, and so on. I’d be able to write a good chunk of the trip off our taxes because I am doing the groundwork for an interdisciplinary senior seminar on nuclear politics, from the development of the bomb to peaceable atoms. {Sidebar: By the way, this type of vacation has already been written about by the husband and wife team of Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger.}

And then, it hit me while I was re-watching the teen angst riddled series Roswell – we could make a side trip to the alien Mecca of the world. Even better, we could make fun of it! So, on the second day of our trip, we got out the Mapquest directions, pulled out of Amarillo, and left the interstate to drive towards Roswell.

Along the way, three notable things occurred:

• My car was attacked by tumbleweeds (unavoidable);
• We learned that Portales is full of happy, shiny people … and three or four old grouches (thanks to a sign on the outskirts of town); and
• We discovered that you better have a bottle of water in the car to rinse the lime chemical burn out of the back of your throat after eating Sabritones [3].

After about four hours of driving, we finally hit the outskirts of Roswell where even the retail/food folks have caught alien fever. The Wal-Mart has aliens painted in all the windows, the Arby’s (at least, I think it was Arby’s but my memory could be faulty) had aliens on its sign, and – as we entered the downtown area – the McDonalds is shaped like a flying saucer. In order to get into the spirit of things, I waived the “No McDonalds Rule” so that we could take a peek at the inside of the shimmery silver building.

UFO Museum in Roswell, NM

After scarfing down about 1200 calories of slightly chilly fries and greasy hamburgers, we made our way to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. We left our backpack at the front desk (too many thieves through the museum lately) and wandered through exhibits that ranged from slightly cool to mildly bizarre, from a horse statute covered in UFO articles to paintings of the future home of the UFO museum, from conspiracies to pop culture. While it was not the best museum I have ever been in, it was definitely an improvement over the Super Museum that I visited with TQE last summer.

We reclaimed our backpack, bought a few minor souvenirs from a slightly snarly cashier, and headed out the door. All of the downtown area is plastered with alien motifs, from the (we think) Christian coffee shop to the city’s street lights. We wandered around for a while because I wanted to go into this place I found on the internet. We eventually found the place, only it was closed for renovations so I couldn’t have my picture taken with an alien. To soothe myself, I went into a different alien store to buy a little green man for my office (he’ll go well with my voodoo doll and my pelican statute) – and let me tell you, the guy who was working the cash register actually looked like an alien. No, he wasn’t green or in a mask. In retrospect, he might have looked more like a hobbit.

The Buildings out at Lea Lake, Built by the CCC
Bottomless Lakes National Monument

By this time, I was utterly sick of aliens and it was really too early to call it a day, so we consulted our slightly dated New Mexico guidebook for ideas. This led us to the Bottomless Lakes State Park, which is about 12 miles outside of Roswell and definitely worth a visit. It’s odd, you know. Here you are, in the middle of desert scrubland and there’s a series of lakes! The little old guy working in the visitors’ center told us that the water for the lakes came from an underground aquifer was recharged by snow melt and rainfall near Ruidoso. The buildings out by Lea Lake, like many in the parks of New Mexico, were constructed by the CCC during the Great Depression [4]. In many ways, this little park was the highlight of our day, even though it was freakin’ cold out.

Other things:

• Our hotel had super thin walls, so I’m very glad that the people were only watching TV and not actually having sex.
• We discovered that our guidebook has a very outdated restaurant section. We ended up at El Torro Bravo which had decent salsa and excellent sopaipas, a friendly waitress, and very odd matador prints decorating the walls.
• The New Mexico Military Institute kinda’ looks like an old fashioned fort. Oh, and apparently Owen Wilson went to school here (or, at least, that’s what the guidebook says).

Footnotes:

1. In this way, we are very much in accord with Alton Brown’s feelings that most people today are too focused on destination vacations. See his introduction to the Feasting on Asphalt River Run book. 
2. You know, after my sister-in-law forgot to invite us to the family’s Christmas shindig. Yeah, like we really wanted to go, but you know, that was so rude.
3. Which have been described as “spicy, limy, chemically and delicious all at once! They are like Mexican S&M for your mouth” on the Chicago Yelp website.
4. I always find this interesting because my grandfather was in the CCC in upstate New York.