Pacific Time Zone

Traditionally the stretch of Interstate Ten between El Paso and Riverside has been, for us, a grind. It's all desert and the novelty of buttes and mesas and sandy colored piles of...sand soon wears thin. By this stage in our transcontinental trek we are ready to have arrived. This next picture was taken in New Mexico shortly after leaving Mesilla. It could be anywhere along the route described above. In case the highway gets too monotonous the Border patrol has fixed up a couple of checkpoints, one in each direction, to check for illegal aliens. "American citizens?" the bored agent asked and waved us through with barely a halt."Shall we..?" I asked my wife a few miles further on.
"It doesn't seem likely..." she demurred.
"Yes, but suppose it's real?"
"We're here for adventure," she said so we pulled off the highway and followed the signs to this:Amazingly enough they had delicious wines, Riesling, chardonnay, Syrah Cabernet and Pinot and we bought some quite decent wines to take with us as a souvenir. It was really rather nice to offer our snobby California friends a taste of New Mexico wine, and find they liked it as much as we did. She was all right too. "Check out Coronado down the Interstate" were her parting words as we staggered out into the blinding sun loaded with pecans and wine. "They're tasting today and they right off the highway." Fort Bowie has wines for sale but as a township it has certainly seen better days.Coronado was technically speaking, visible from the Interstate. My wife figured it was a stretch to say they were "close" to the freeway. Perhaps she got that impression because the road wasn't paved.And guess what: the wines were splendid once again. The scenery wasn't bad either.Our pourer was a native of nearby Willcox who went out to see the world and came home to marry a Dutchman. Apparently a number of Dutch have been imported to grow world class tomatoes in the Arizona desert and one of them had the good taste to ask her to marry him.

We left around four pm with a trunk starting to resemble nothing quite so much as a well stocked wine cellar. More open road awaited us. Cheyenne snoozed I tried not to.Arizona's state line passed in a blur but our clocks went back an hour, assuring us we wouldn't be late for dinner. We droned on at 80mph in a 75mph speed limit. Eventually we hit what passes for civilization in the Arizona desert, a state that it turns out doesn't like immigrants or helmet laws. It's not all bad.

Josh the Key West High School Teacher is in Tempe for the summer working at his Master's in Physics and living the bachelor life in an apartment in an anonymous suburban street near Arizona State University. He didn't seem to be missing his little canal house on Sugarloaf Key. Perhaps he was putting on a brave face, or he was just worrying about his work load which is apparently tremendous. His thesis has to be 70 pages long. His wife was with her parents so he cooked dinner. Cheyenne rested, not very entertained by the 110 degree heat outdoors. The next day Josh had a hangover and went to class, I had no hangover but we left with a lot less Gosling Black Label rum in the bottle than we had arrived with. This is East Lemon Street in Tempe. "It's not so bad," Josh said. "Tempe has a great public transportation system." Which doesn't make this pretty in my opinion:Besides, on my early dawn walk with Cheyenne in the cool of the morning we came across some drunk students on a balcony and they took exception to my pink Crocs. "Come up here and tell me that!" the ringleader yelled down at me after I advised him he was a scaredy cat if he was afraid to be seen in public in pink sandals. "I will take you with me as a fond memory of Tempe," I called back and his girlfriend pulled him out of sight. Really, it doesn't bode well for Arizona, a state raising such fussy dressers for the next generation.

Arizona is also distinguished by using a European approach to traffic control, installing these speed cameras on major highways. They have also started using mobile cameras mounted on SUVs. These they park in strategic locations and move them around at will. Very sneaky. The good news is camera tickets don't generate moving violation points and the tickets have to be served so out of town tags can we are told, simply ignore them. I will see how many I got when I get home.They really do have these ridiculous plants in the Arizona desert.

And you thought they were just the product of a fevered imagineer's imagination at Disney.

California is somewhere around that hill.

Getting close.

That smudge of trailers and neon signs in the valley must be Blythe. Cool.

La Mesilla

We left Van Horn, Texas not too early in the morning, and faced several more hours of this:I might rather have been doing this than finding myself struggling to pay attention behind the wheel as we droned through through the abomination of desolation:

A couple of things were working in our favor as we drove to make a dinner deadline with Josh in Tempe, Arizona. They are called Time Zones. Van Horn is just to the eats of the divide between central and Mountain times so five minutes after we left the Motel 6 at nine o'clock, the time suddenly became 8:05 am. Then, because Arizona doesn't observe Summer Time we effectively entered the Pacific Time Zone when we crossed from New Mexico. All this messing with the clocks meant we could dawdle on our way through the deserts. Though we didn't dawdle in the urban nightmare that is El Paso on the Mexican Border.The border has been tightened up so much we just looked across the meandering Rio Grande river at the slums of Old Mexico from the comfort of our first world freeway. In years past I have driven down to the American side of the river and watched the Mexicans wade the border, but these days it is a no go zone heavily patrolled by federal agents behind the imposing new fence.
Drawing away to the north on I-10 the Interstate took us into southern New Mexico and that state's second largest city. Las Cruces boasts a population of some 85,000 people in a city so bland it has a four lane highway driving through the middle. years ago, looking for downtown we asked a shop clerk where it was. She looked blank and said simply:"Here." So we wrote Las Cruces off as a pit. This time my wife's iPhone indicated killer burritos were to be had at a little store on the main drag into town. We parked the Fusion (Cheyenne, really) safely in the shade and went looking for food in this unlikely place.Urban Spoon is the wife's favorite application on her iPhone and as i drive and Cheyenne sleeps she is busy working away on the phone. "I think we should try here for lunch," she says confidently. This from a woman who can't read a map, even after 16 years of marriage. In Las Cruces Urban Spoon says eat here, at the Fina Station's Santa Fe Grill...

Four dollars and eighteen cents each and we sit down with a red chili burrito and a green chili burrito and they are delicious.We order one wrapped in a tortilla and one on a plate and as Jewish marriage law requires, we share. My wife says it's the law so it must be, and she's Jewish. Note the potato cubes, an unusual and perfect addition.We cause hushed horror at the check out when we ask if we can drink a beer with our lunch so we retreat hastily and open cokes. "A bit too European," I mutter to my giggling wife. The beer we keep for later and yummy it was too.

Lunch among the aspirin. Living as I do in the Florida Keys it had been a while since I had seen a dandelion.We happen to spot a sign from the car pointing to a historic district and so, with time zones to spare we meander south across the Interstate. We stumble across Old Mexico in New Mexico.

Cheyenne took the lead past the church of San Albino.The church as it happens, offers refuge to embarrassed women. Embarazada in Spanish actually means pregnant (don't get all serious on me here) and naturally the Catholic influence in this part of the world means pregnancy is actually embarrassing and apparently San Albino wants to save every possible soul as discreetly as possible by sticking up a bi-lingual sign to the effect that if you are PREGNANT we can help.

If you do happen to look Middle Eastern (embarrassed or not) this lot are also here to help- boot you out.Cheyenne said it was too hot for a tea party thanks.

Mesilla is also known as La Mesilla or Old Mesilla depending on who you ask and has a population of about 2,000 people, far smaller than neighboring Las Cruces. What happened was the city wanted to overcharge the railroad to come through town and when a farmer in Las Cruces offered them free dirt they jumped at the offer and Mesilla got sidelined by history.

Bad for them, great for tourists as the town is the epitome of New Mexican adobe without all the tourist trap overdone bullshit of Taos. Mesilla is lovely, understated and much appreciated by the people who have discovered this lovely little town. I highly recommend a stop if you are cruising Interstate Ten through New Mexico. Cheyenne had a great time too.Apparently Mesilla was a border town separating Old Mexico from the United States as the Yankees moved west. The exact border was disputed until the Gadsden Purchase settled the border in 1853, putting the city in the US. Then in the Civil war the western Confederates occupied the city and claimed it as the Capital of the Arizona Territory for their side. California Volunteers recaptured it in 1862 and the fighting was effectively over in this part of the world.

These days Mesilla is a town filled with tourist knick knack shoppes, wine tasting, and restaurants. My wife loved poring over the jewelry, rugs, wraps and statues in the stores. One store keeper told us Mesilla is, weirdly enough, a hub for snowbirds who don't mind cold temperatures but want to escape winter snows. This town is hopping apparently in winter. I, who think 50 degrees is cold find it hard to picture people swanning around here in mid winter talking about how lovely the weather is.

Outside this home we see, in addition to the fence, the classic New Mexican decorative ristra which is a string of drying chile peppers. This serves the dual purpose of decorating the home and providing dry pepper pods to spice up cooking during the winter.

Mesilla is much lovelier than I have managed to portray here. I am astonished we never previously discovered it as we sued to practically live on I-10 when we were moving our lives from Santa Cruz to Key West.

The classic Latin American raised sidewalks seen here:

Here we see the shady arcade covering the sidewalks around the plaza.

Courtyards and alleys are a big deal in this town.

The plaza is a good place to take one's ease and imagine one is in Old Mexico.

This shot is for buffetguy and riepe. She liked Cheyenne enough to show off some cleavage. Good dog.

We spent a fair bit of time and money in this store. All the shop owners were friendly and easy going about having the dog in their stores.

Bright sun, mountains, and more miles to cover.

Got to keep moving, though now we had some New Mexican red wine in the trunk, along with peppered nuts, jellies and pepper candy.