Road Trip Day 13 - Tuesday, 7th May, 2019

View of Albuquerque from the hotel.

Set out this morning to find breakfast at a diner on 66, but it was closed. Consulting Google Maps, I headed for Cafe Lush which came well reviewed. A stroke of luck. Not only was the food excellent - I had French Toast which was about as far away from the standard version as to be a whole new invention, with coconut milk, sprinkled with cinnamon, blueberries and a strawberry (so five a day nearly ticked) - but met a couple from England. Mark was from Bristol and they were just completing a two week holiday in the area. He recommended I make a detour to see Tinker Town, north and east of the city. A 35 mile round trip, travelling back east, is of little consequence in a journey of 2500 miles.

Had I actually read my EZ guide, I would have seen that the route on I40 through NM, rather than the Santa Fe loop I took, goes within a few miles of Tinker Town, and enters the city on Central, which is adjacent to where I was staying. So I had the added bonus of travelling about 15 miles of post-1937 66, which I would have missed, twice. The road passes through strip malls lined with old 66 motels and diners, and even a giant muffler man, who appears to be armless.

This is also where the 17 miles of neon that I didn't find last night is, but the area is "gritty" as the Guide says, so perhaps not the best area for dawdling along at night taking pictures.

The road climbs steadily until it reaches the forests on the upper slopes of the surrounding hills. On the way is the "singing road", a short stretch of old 66 which "plays" America the Beautiful if you drive over it at 45 miles an hour. It is absolutely true. And in tune as well.

Tinker Town is just inside the Sandia Forest, a ski area, which rises to Sandia Mountain at 10,678ft. It is the creation of carpenter and artist Ross Ward, who died some years ago of early onset Alzheimer's. It is impossible to describe. If you have ever been to "The House on the Rock" in Wisconsin, the creation of another single artist, that is the closest to it, and indeed Ward modelled his museum on it. Inside a maze of buildings, many lined with the ends of bottles, is a wonderland of hand-carved tableaux of frontier America, circuses and carnivals; collections of dolls; old fairground automata; buildings rescued from ghost towns. All the videos will be put on my Youtube channel  LilibetaC

 Here is a taster.

This is the link to the longest, the Frontier Town,  which walks you the whole length of the tableau. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nSTyAhRyec&t=31s

There are shorter ones of the details for which you had to push a button. Here are some stills showing the details.

At the photographers

The Toyshop

The Saloon

I remember seeing this when I was a child.

Grandma Esmerelda, the Fortune Teller. 

The video for this is also on Youtube, together with another, the Mummy's Tomb or similar, which used to be on English piers.

This one is of the Cemetery on Boot Hill. The video is on You Tube,

Scary clowns

There is this tableau of a circus with moving figures, which is on youtube. Here is a still.

This is for Gina and the crew at Langley Academy! The caption reads:"'Dreamers in Paradise'. (Teachers on Vacation)."

This is a Snake Oil Salesman's wagon, as in the Wizard of Oz, owned by an itinerant quack doctor who sold remedies for any ailment, based on "snake oil".







These are buildings rescued from dying and dead towns.

An "Okie" wagon

Carla Ward, Ross's widow, lives on the property and was unpacking books for the Gift Shop as I left. She explained that the collection had been private until people started to show an interest in visiting, when they opened it to the public.

There is also a boat, Theodora R.

Built in England in 1936, it was sailed to Florida by a husband and wife team, where it was sold to Fritz Damler, Carla's brother.  Fritz spent 10 years sailing Theodora R. around the world. He documented his adventures in a book "Ten Years Behind the Mast". And guess who was in Town?

Fritz came to my rescue when I couldn't get Ruby started and thought the battery was dead. Turns out that, as I had been sitting sorting the map out for a while, I had taken my foot off the brake and omitted to press the brake again when I tried to start the engine - which is a no-go. Doh.

Leaving TT, I drove old 66 back to Albuquerque and on toward Gallup, the last major town before the Arizona border. Just west of Albuquerque, you cross the Rio Grande. Not a good picture but worth noting.

At Mesita, the mesas, or flat-topped "tablelands", rise out of the desert. They are caused by "differential erosion", where rocks of different composition erode at different speeds, the softer rocks being eroded first to leave the harder formations standing above.











At McCarty's, a side trip south for 12.5 miles through Acoma pueblo lands takes you to the Acoma Mesa and "Sky City", reputedly the oldest, continuously inhabited "city" in America. On the way you pass the church of Santa Maria de Acoma.

This distant view of  "Sky City" was taken from about a mile away.

Here, it looks as if the town sits on top of a single mesa. In fact, the road descends a few hundred feet to run across the valley, and it is revealed that there is a large mesa in front of, and separated from, the one that the town is perched upon. You can only go up to the pueblo on guided tours and unfortunately they had finished for the day.

Back at McCarty's the road to Grants runs alongside black lava deposits.

Grants itself has a few 66 relics.

To the north, a line of pink hills runs along parallel to the road and railway.

A few miles further is the Continental Divide, the watershed where waters run into the Pacific, rather than the Atlantic.

The number of "trading posts" and shops selling Native American crafts grows exponentially from now on, as I40 and 66 run through various reservations belonging to the Zuni, who are pueblo people, and the Navajo, through into Arizona.

I spent the night just outside Gallup, a few miles from the Arizona border.