Greetings
Virtual Travellers:
I'm
kind of surprised the number of people who wrote asking what a Mad
Hatter's Tea Party was. It was, well, a tea party. There was a table
set out under the Ironwood Tree in front of The Cat Drag'd Inn and
the Gerryman and the Deelady were having tea at it. Other guests were present
as well including Sara(h) La Gata feasting on a Boredmouse. Some guests
were wearing red hats and others nothing at all. The table was really a
desk set at a precarious tilt so the cups were only half full and the sugar
cubes slid down to the ants but there were lots of chairs set about. No
Room! No Room! they cried when they saw me coming but I had the crumpets
and so they made room.
Just east of The Daily Pie is the Center of Town. Post office on the
north side of the street and camping in the park on the south side. The
Continental Divide crosses Main Street (U.S.60) nearby. I spent the day
in the park looking for an air leak and sewing a split in the seat cover
of the captain's chair. Never a dull moment. Plenty of sun to charge batteries
and finally warm enough to work outside without hat and gloves. There is
a man living in a tent nearby.
On the road after breky; --It's all Down Hill from Here-- it says on the sign and the Tee-shirt. The Cat will Drag Inn again after Christmas I told them.
We have met the enemy... and elected him.
Side trip to Bosque del Apache. This is one of my favourite hiking spots. A little on the cool side this morning but a good day to take my Limmers out for a walk.
Another side trip to Abó Pueblo (ahBOO). The rough cut red sandstone "bricks" that comprise these ruins are all that remain of the pottery communities that thrived here up until three centuries ago. Changing climate and the incursion of other peoples eventually caused the native population to leave. www.nps.gov/sapu
End of the road at dark today is in the town of Vaughn, a wide spot
at the junction of U.S. routes 60 & 54. The speedo cable is making
noises so that is the next to fix. (253 miles)
For instance: Twenty some odd miles east of Abó Pueblo on U.S.60, east also of the town of Willard (wasn't there a scary movie by that title?), there is a geographical feature called Laguna Del Perro. A wide expanse of whitish-grey flatness with footsteps in the softness around the edge below the nearby rest area. The historical plaque is a bit hard to decipher being as it is riddled with bullet holes and faded from the sun but it has something to say about this salt lake having been very important to the natives and the traders of a certain long time ago. But why "Lake of the Dog"? Do you suppose this is where the term "Salty Dog" originates?
Now at Hartley, with the Webers. Time for some visiting. (203 miles)
Nan and Ed are in the business, if you can call it that, of ministering.
They make Tee-shirts to spread the
message of their church and then travel to rallies and conferences
to sell them. The major project at this moment is the construction of a
care center in between the guest house and the ministry building. Between
telling storeys for my supper and helping with the skirt project I worked
at The Cat Drag'd Inn cleaning, checking, and looking for an air leak buried
in the intermittentcy of uncounted variables. And writing this long letter.
Good
start and a short drive. First stop at Cal Farley's Boys Ranch to look
for the "Shirttail to Hang Onto" cache and check out the historic Oldham
County court house. The Julian Bivins Museum, housed in the old courthouse,
is a great place to visit and I recommend it to all. On U.S.385, northwest
of Amarillo, between Vega and Channing, this is a working cattle ranch
comprising a small community in itself, with its own independent school
district. Boys Ranch hosts a rodeo in September and a Cowboy
Poetry show in early Summer. I spoke for a while with Mike at the Aministration
Building: Since about 1994 I have been spending two hundred dollars a year
to support a boy (food, books, housing, and uniforms) at the CSI
school in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India. From Mike I learned that it costs
Cal Farley Boys Ranch sponsors about $1200.00 a year just for food and
clothing. No comments, just facts.
"It's where you're going that counts", Cal Farley said. Ya... So... Where am I going?
Down
the road to Adrian.
This town is on Route 66, half way between Chicago
and Los Angeles. "When you're here you're halfway there." The
"Meet Ya Halfway" cache is nearby to the MidPoint Diner where they have
some very excellent meatloaf.
Out east through Amarillo to take on 113 gallons of fuel and think once again what else I could be doing with the US$216.00 that cost me--another year for the boy at the boarding school in Erode.
More
east along I-40 and the next stop is to find a cache at the Bug Ranch.
Sort of like the Cadillac Ranch to the west of Amarillo but I hadn't stop'd
there. I used to own a Bug--my first car. Looked like one of these for
that matter. I didn't find the cache here but I had fun sitting behind
the wheel and remembering those days.
Last stop before dark was the Cross at Groom TeXas. Ed said that this is the tallest cross in the world. You can see it looming above the horizon from about eight miles away.
This
day's end is at the Donley County Rest Area a few miles southeast of Hedley.
206 miles today.
Amazing
what one finds along the road. 76367 is the ZIP code for Iowa Park but
that didn't occur to me until I looked up the addy of one of my pen-friends
after the sign that said "Allred" went past on U.S.287 at the junction
with Fm369. All red I said? By that time I was another exit further east
and made a U-turn to go and look closer. Getting any closer than the end
of their drive gave me creepy feelings and brought into question matters
of my sanity so I took a picture and beat a hasty retreat. Maybe another
time Matt.
The
cache in Lucy Park was my next find. Good place for lunch. Good place for
a walk. One of these days I will learn to do this right so I don't spend
so much time bushwacking. Three other caches today I did not find but they
were still nice walks and Sara(h) enjoyed the chance to get out and explore
too.
Most of the day's driving was on secondary roads: U.S.287 and U.S.380.
This day's end is at the Wal-Mart of McKinney TeXas. 287 miles travelled
and several hours of goofing off.
Everything else performed well. Fuel mileage for the past 800 miles
is at 9.3 mpg.
Second start got somewhere. Secondary road driving all the way to Mobile. All the more reason to not drive in the rain. All I did was drive today, and tell storeys to Sara(h). She's not much of a conversationalist; a good listener except that she tends to go to sleep just when I get to the good parts.
Between Jackson Mississippi and Mobile Alabama along U.S. routes 49 for the first half and 98 for the second . . . o O (hmmm... There's a relationship I didn't notice when I was driving it...) there are a lot of small towns with strange names. "D'Lo"; "Bryan", my sister-son; "Neely", from _A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"? Hattiesburg is right in the middle. I had a Great Aunt Hattie on the Newton side.
Along the Way somewhen later, about 18h30 GMT, I chanced to hear an Amateur Radio Station calling CQ-CQ. His call was K1USN. Mine is K1OIQ. So I called him back. --Ahh! A K1, he said, you must be very close. Not really, I replied, not likely anyhow; I'm near Hattiesburg Mississippi, where are you? --Quincy Massachusetts, aboard the USS Salem, operating in commeration of this Veteran's Day.
It turned out to be a neat conversation. He went on to tell me about the shipyard there and I replied that my father was a welder there during WWII. --Really, he said. My father was a welder here too, at that same time. Perhaps they knew each other.
Jackson Mississippi to Almost Pensacola, 236 miles and a lot of rain.
Beulah is the nearby strange named town.
I had a nice walk around the nature trail, naturally, and did some of my own hurricane clean-up. The two biggest trees I was not able to move but at least it is now easier to climb over them and get past all the branches and clutter. Also picked up about seven gallons of trash.
Strange named towns today: Gordon, my brother; Quincy, my natal town's name; Izagora, what, I don't know.
FLorida has a Natural Bridge too. It is still under construction.
To Tallahassee: 219 miles
To Z'hills: 263 miles
Still looking for the Thanksgiving Turkey. I should have looked in the
mirror before I left Tonopah, probly could have saved my self a lot of
driving.
Visiting with Joan and Roger and chasing after a few caches took up
the rest of the day.
Lee County FLorida has a place called Dog Beach. "This Place is Going to the Dogs" has come to pass. From the "Sooda Scoop" we learn that out on Hickory Boulevard, just north of the New Pass bridge, Dog Beach has been reopened. Besides being a place were doggies and dog-ers can recreate leashless, the dogs have every opportunity to learn from their peoples the fine art of littering. Let me go on record at the top by saying: No more than all people litter do all dogs litter. But dogs start out as litterers.
As is my wont when I walk a beach I often bring a trashbag as well as my chair and book. After a chapter of _The Kite Runner_ and a short nap in the sun I went along the sandy trail to see what I might find. Balls! Dogs loose their balls in more ways than one. Dogs loose their balls more than people loose their beer cans. It was a close margin to be sure but in the short section of trail gleaned I collected 17 balls, mostly of the tennis variety, and only 15 beer cans. I put the balls in the Lost & Found box and the cans in the recycle bin.
Further south is Naples. I don't much like Collier County FLorida and Naples has the unfortunate distinction to be its County Seat. Too bad some of my friends live there. Three of Nan and Ed Weber's ten girls live in North Naples with their husbands and kids. South even more, the southern most point of this tour, nearly to Marco Island, lives Nancy.
I had supper with Beth & Rosendo, Rachel & Jorge and 6, 7, rugrats.
Michelle & Trent were out to her b'day dinner. Then, after coffee and
pie, on down the road to a risky night at the Wal-Mart camp-NOT. In this
county the rules are different. No camping at Wal-Marts, no resting in
Rest Areas. It is risky to linger too long at a traffic light. At oh-dark-thirty
the process of waking me started by the alarum cat and exacerbated by the
increasing noise of commuter traffic was brought to fruition by a thud-thud-thud
on my door. Time to move along.
Besides the mosquitos in this park there is an historic Walking Dredge.
On the National Register of Engineering Things the machine has six legs
and a big shovel and was used to dig the Tamiami Canal.
Love, ajo
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to
myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier
shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
before me. --Sir Isaac Newton
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Copyright © 2004, A.J.Oxton, The
Cat Drag'd Inn , Center Conway NH 03813-0144.