A Little Family Time

On Saturday, Apr 19 I drove down to Los Lunas to visit Marc, Elaine and the kids. Maria, who just turned 13, seems to have grown the most since the last time I saw her a year ago. She reminds me very much of what Elaine must have looked like at that age: long, tall, and lanky. Aaron's taller too, as is Jake. Jake seems to be the family entertainer. Never a dull moment in his house, I'll bet, and his folks say the same is true at school. Maria's in 7th grade, Aaron in 4th, and Jake's in kindergarten.

We went to a Mexican food place in Peralta for lunch. I visited with them for about two hours and I am kicking myself for having forgotten my camera.

Sunday, Deb and I went to a very good Mexican food place in Corrales called Garduno's and had the absolute best brunch I've ever had. Eggs, sausage, bacon, pancakes, waffles, omelets, chicken enchiladas, sopaipillas, fajitas, fresh fruit, cereals, danish and cinnamon rolls, and then desserts. I was proud that neither of us overate. It was very, very good.

We had planned to go to Old Town to see some kind of festival going on there, but Deb mentioned Madrid and I was interested in going there. I love Madrid; it started out as a coal mining town but went bust in the late 1800's and had been a ghost town until people started moving in around the late 1960's. It's a very "hippie" town; Abbie Hoffman, while he was on the run, wrote articles and sent them to various liberal magazines and newspapers, and one of his best was an article called "Too High to Die", about the Madrid residents. One of the local businesswomen told us Madrid has no potable water; the water supply was permanently ruined by the mining. She said folks who live there have water trucked into town from Albuquerque. The water is safe for laundering but tastes, smells and looks bad, and is "fizzy" (trying to think of the word - is it effervescent?). Only one road runs through Madrid, and the residents live right on that narrow road, or in the hillsides surrounding the town. If you're headed toward Sandia Crest from Albuquerque, just keep going straight instead of turning up to the Crest. You'll eventually get to Santa Fe and you can't avoid Madrid. Drive slow: lots of foot traffic in that road, the vast majority of whom are tourists. The rest are local hippies.

The place is pretty well commercialized now, but in a very charming, attractive, rustic way. I bought two of the prettiest pieces of Indian jewely and a rug from Oaxaca at a couple of the shops there.

We stopped at the sole bar in town , the Mine Shaft (that won't last long! - although, now that I think about it, it was the only bar there fifteen years ago when Marc and one of his motocycle buddies took me for a ride from Albuq. to Madrid), and enjoyed a slow beer, then left for home after spending about six hours just strolling through the town and visiting the shops. A good day....

Driving back to Albuquerque, we spotted what we first thought were heavy clouds, but then realized it was smoke from the fires in the Manzano mountains. We hadn't noticed them on the way to Madrid because we were facing away from them. I heard later in the evening on the news that several families have had to be evacuated from the area.

Today was clothes laundry day, and tomorrow will be rug cleaning day; it's time to get the rig ready to head for another destination. I leave next Monday, Apr. 28 and will stay the night in Cortez, Colo., that night, then head into Grand Junction the 29th. I washed the car today: god! what a job, and it's a small car! It was pretty filthy; I had driven to Los Lunas on Saturday with my windshield almost completely obscured by filth: elm pitch and dust from our recent sandstorms. I've got to take VanGo to the RV shop that installed my satellite antenna and make sure it's working right; I was never able to because the day the work was done was a cloudy day and we couldn't get a signal. I'd really like to wash the rig, too, but....god, if I think Oor's a pain to wash, what's VanGo gonna be like? I can't reach high enough and sure as heck am not getting on top of the rig to do the roof, but it sure needs it. What I need is a 6'5" teenager who works cheap.