My Road Trip Adventure, Part III: New Mexico

This is part three in a series about my travels on Route 66 (and beyond) in July 2012. See Part I here & Part II here.

This part covers Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Shamrock, Texas.

"The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives." - William Saroyan

We motored on through the vast desert, past old hand painted billboards & great red rocks, the sky an ever-changing constellation of clouds. 

We reached Albuquerque in the evening. A bustling city full of freeways and fast-moving cars, it was a far cry from the deserted landscapes we had come from. After a good night's sleep, we wandered around the city looking for a post office and Los Pollos Hermanos (Breaking Bad forever), and then we grabbed lunch at the Pueblo Harvest Cafe: chicken nambe relleno, carne adovada, and blue corn tortillas, all washed down with a couple of Cokes. We quickly decided one night in ABQ was just right, so we hatched a plan to drive up to Santa Fe via the Turquoise Trail, a National Scenic Byway that winds past ranches, old mining towns, and vast stretches of lands that were once rich with turquoise.

When we reached the outskirts of Albuquerque, just at the entrance of the Turquoise Trail, we saw the turn off for Tinkertown, a museum of tiny figurines all hand carved and elaborately staged by one man, Ross Ward, over the course of 40 years. From Tinkertown's website:

It took Ross Ward over 40 years to carve, collect, and lovingly construct what is now Tinkertown Museum. His miniature wood-carved figures were first part of a traveling exhibit, driven to county fairs and carnivals in the 1960s and ’70s. Today over 50,000 glass bottles form rambling walls that surround a 22-room museum. Wagon wheels, old fashioned store fronts, and wacky western memorabilia make Tinkertown’s exterior as much as a museum as the wonders within.  

Inside, the magic of animation takes over. The inhabitants of a raucous little western town animate to hilarious life. Under the big top, diminutive circus performers challenge tigers and defy gravity while the Fat Lady fans herself and a polar bear teeters and totters.  

Throughout, eccentric collections of Americana (wedding cake couples, antique tools, bullet pencils and much, much more) fill Tinkertown’s winding hallways. Otto the one-man-band and Esmerelda, the Fortune Teller, need only a quarter to play a tune or predict your future. Through a doorway and across a ramp waits a big-sized surprise: a 35′ antique wooden sailboat that braved a 10 year voyage around the world.

The museum is stunning in its scope and detail, and contained not only Ward's figurines, but antiques and collectibles as well, including old arcade games. Walking through the museum has a kind of feeling of melancholia, however, when coupled with the knowledge that Ward was diagnosed with Alzheimer's early in life, at age 57, and he lived the last years of his life having forgotten all he created.



We carried on, through scrub and brush and mountains and valleys, all sun-drenched and dry as bones until reached Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid), a coal-mining town that thrived in the early 1900's. For years it bustled as much as an isolated desert town could, and even boasted the only baseball field west of the Mississippi with lights. It's prosperity was short-lived, however; when coal use declined, mines closed and residents moved away. Buildings fell to ruin and disrepair, and Madrid was a ghost town until the 1970's, when artists began to move in, opening galleries and shops, helping return Madrid to some of its former glory.



We reached Santa Fe by late evening. After a restful night we woke to a beautiful blue day, which we spent wandering around old town, among the adobe and old west style buildings that thad me dreaming of stand-offs and shoot-outs and spurred boots scraping the ground.



We rambled most of the day, sought out gourmet doughnuts (and discovered the owner was a local of our area back home), and then packed up and hit the road once again.

Just thirty-seven miles west of the Texas border sits my favorite little town in New Mexico, and possibly along the entirety of Route 66: Tucumcari. Tucumcari has enough neon on its main street to light up a small town and enough kitsch to bring a smile to even the most uptight of travelers. It's a place where the spirit of Route 66 seems to have never left, which is why what you'll find next is quite a detailed report of our night there...

Tucumcari Tonite!

In the years following WWII, real estate in Tucumcari boomed and motels by the mile were built, turning Tucumcari into “a town with two thousand rooms." Most of the town is located along one main street, the old Route 66, which was abandoned once the I-40 was completed. Restaurants, grocery stores, and motels all share space along the old highway, each with signs more extravagant than the next. Del’s restaurant features a giant plastic cow standing atop its name. There’s the Palomino, Buckaroo, and Apache motels, all with glittering neon signs depicting their namesakes. The standout, however, was Tepee Curios, which not only has a neon sign, but a façade in the shape of a giant tepee, emblazoned with the Zia sun symbol.

The drive off the freeway that takes you into Tucumcari from the west is long and empty, until you reach the Tucumcari Trading Post. A sign guaranteeing antiques, leather goods and western décor hung in the window of the red metal building. Antique gas pumps and rusted metal signs lay piled around the entrance, a veritable pathway of junk leading to door. I parked the car next to a row of metal mailboxes marked one through seven, though I can’t imagine whom they belonged to, unless the abandoned motel adjacent once took post for renters. An errant crop of corn, no larger than the bed of a truck, was growing behind the mailboxes, looking as if it had sprung up accidently, but had somehow thrived on its own.



Inside the Trading Post one can buy cowboy hats, tooled leather purses, Christmas garlands made out of cinnamon-scented pinecones, vintage coats still wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaners, old metal Coca-Cola dispensers, and Victorian dolls wearing faded pinafores. A couple who came in before us were busy cutting a deal with the owner on a brass bed frame, trying to figure out how they could get it back to their home in Iowa for the right price.



We decided to stay at one of the better-known motels in Tucumcari: the Blue Swallow. Built in 1941, it features thirteen attached units laid out in a U-shape with a lobby in the center. Blue neon swallows decorate the stucco at various intervals, and metal awnings block out the sun and rain over each door and window. In 1958, a local businessman bought the motel and gave it to his fiancé, Lillian Redman, who would be the owner for the next forty years. The most iconic piece of the motel wasn’t added until 1960—the blue swallow flying over the name of the motel, along with advertisements of 100% REFRIGERATED AIR and BUDGET PRICES.



Our room was like stepping into a time warp. The chenille bedspreads were emblazoned with a blue swallow and a black rotary phone sat on the bedside table. The bathroom had the original tile work, blue sunbursts outlined by white octagons, and the cabinet holding the television was also a television—a 1960’s dial box encased in wood.



Later, we went out to cruise the strip. Tucumcari is a painted town—murals by local artists can be found on the sides of countless buildings. Most depict Route 66 memories: motorcycles on the open highway, road signs, vintage cars, open sky. Others show the history of the town and general Americana. One particularly interesting one is on the walls of a smoke shop, entitled “Where’s My Horse” #1 and #2. On one side of the building, a cowboy is looking for his horse through an abstract painting that looks similar to a Jackson Pollock, on the other side of the building, you can see the horse hiding behind the painting.

We drove past the newly renovation train station on the edge of town. We paused and took in the charred black remains of the Sands-Dorsey Drugstore, a hundred year old building that burned down in 2007. We decided to catch a film at the 1930s Art Deco cinema where the tickets cost less than a small popcorn would at a cinema in a big city.



The sky was dark when we got back to the Blue Swallow, but the neon was shining bright and the soft sound of fifties music was floating through the air. Guests were sitting out on their scallop chairs, mostly silent, having a drink and listening to the music.



The next morning, we were in Texas before we knew it. My favorite stop on Texan soil was Shamrock, a small town with a gorgeous 1930's Art Deco style Conoco gas station. What a beauty.



And then we were off again, with plans to drive the next couple hundred miles to Oklahoma City...