2020 was different alright. But I’d rather not recount all the ways. Instead, I’ll ring in the new year with a no gripes, just gratitude, attitude. And let’s see how long that will last.
The Rio Grande @Elephant Butte Dam
It was a year when we all struggled to maintain our social and family traditions. One of our family’s rituals has been to travel during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Being at work is the last place you’ll find me during this time of year. Not when three days of vacation snags two weekends plus the entire week in between. For us it has always been a perfect time to travel, to see friends and family, to unwind and to recharge. Despite the pandemic, for the sake of our mental health, we had to get out of the house. But of course, do it as safely as possible.
New Mexico - Christmas 2020
For years, our go-to Christmas travel spot has been Las Vegas. No gambling, just wonderful food, hiking and 2 to 3 Cirque du Soleil shows. Besides, you know, a guy gotta have a little Zumanity in his life, if you know what I mean? For the record, Vivien’s favorite is “O.” Seriously though, between Death Valley National Park and all the great Nevada State parks nearby, Vegas can serve as a useful hub for a wonderful outdoorsy vacation. Plus, it’s a photo-rich environment, if you like neon as I do. But not this year - too many people, too big a crowd, too much Covid. Thus, our Plan A became a royal bust.
Near Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, New Mexico
Our Plan B was to be a beachy sojourn to Southern California. Christmas and the surf had all the makings of a very celebratory season. Then Cali went into serious pandemic lockdown, again, and our San Diego Christmas beachfront getaway got washed away in a Covid riptide.
This brings us to Plan C. The one which we actually did. An outdoorsy National, State and Local parks and Monuments centered road trip, covering parts of our two neighboring states - Texas and New Mexico. Actually, Texas became a late scratch, more on that later. The map below shows all the outdoor places we visited. And with only a few exceptions, mostly when picking up take-out dinners, we did not come within 10-feet of another human being during our entire 10 days on the road.
Our Christmas 2020 Road Trip - 10-Days, 1800 Miles and Lots of Fun
Near Taos, New Mexico
Our 1800 miles road trip took us from our home on the east side of Phoenix, along a counterclockwise loop, via Interstates I-10, I-25, I-40 and finally I-17 on our way back home. The notable cities we stopped in were Tucson AZ, Las Cruces, Albuquerque and Taos NM, with many small towns and off-road detours in between.
Crossing the Arizona Desert
At first, we tried following our “Rule of 2s”: Drive a maximum of 200 miles each day; arrive at our destination before 2:00PM; and spend at least 2 hours sightseeing every day. But, because of the vast expansiveness of the desert Southwest, we found it hard to keep our milage under 200 per-day. Combined with our detours for sightseeing, along with the weather messing with us, there were a few days of 275+ miles. Although, I will say that the detours were all well worth it.
With SUV packed with coolers full of food, suitcases bulging with “winter clothes,” camera bags loaded with my photoing gear, and a special duffel bag bursting with Vivien’s varied assortment of boots, for which there was no room for my one and only pair of hiking shoes, the Day 1 segment, from home to Tucson, is a quick-n-easy 120-miles jaunt. My favorite stop along the way is Picacho Peak State Park. The views from atop its peak are just gorgeous, with miles of desert punctuated by grids of cotton fields, and a straight-to-the-horizon Union Pacific Railway track that ferries the longest freight trains I have ever seen in my life. We call days like today “Repositioning Day,” where nothing much happens. Its purpose is to either set up a shorter, more manageably segment for the following day, or to take us to our next major interim destination.
The View From Atop Picacho Peak near Tucson Arizona
The Saquaro - Arizona’s State Flower are Plentiful in Picacho State Park near Tucson
It’s Day Two, and the drive from Tucson, Arizona to Las Cruces New Mexico is a mostly flat, wide open stretch, that’s prone to strong blinding dust storms during the scorching heat of the summer monsoon season. Today is a cool 45 degrees, with gray-blue clouds hanging low in the sky. This portion of Interstate 10 is sandwiched between Mount Graham to the north and the Chiricahua Mountains to the south. We traverse west to east, less than 60 miles from the border with Mexico. Encounters with Border Patrol along this stretch of highway are not uncommon. It’s a put the car on cruise-control, queue up some podcasts, and enjoy the ride, kind-of-a day.
Las Cruces, New Mexico
The Organ Mountains Anchoring Las Cruces New Mexico
The podcast of the day is DS&M (Death Sex &Money), that touches on all three topics, entertainingly. We listen to each episode and then discuss them. We find these chats to be very healthy for our marriage and it helps the miles to fly by quickly. Today’s episodes are “financial therapy” sessions, where a Financial Therapist (yes, it’s a thing), helps individuals deal with the emotional side of money problems. It’s not the tactical nor typical budgeting financial advise fare. Rather, there’s a lot of “how does that make you feel” questions. The psychologist in Vivien finds all this really interesting. The engineer in me is just glad that we have long passed this stage in our marriage.
Wonder of wonders, it’s a few days before Christmas and this stretch of I-10 is devoid of Amazon, UPS and FedEx trucks. Somebody’s Christmas gifts will be late. We take such small blessings wherever we can get them. We cover the 280 miles in about 5 hours, with one Border Patrol stop, a brief lunch break and two stops for my drone pictures, all included. I love these “highway shots” where the road stretches to the horizon, the place where earth meets sky.
Near Deming New Mexico - Mostly Empty I-10 before Christmas
Mostly Empty Hotels for this Entire Trip
Las Cruces, anchored by the saw-tooth shaped Organ Mountains to the East, is home to the New Mexico State Univ. Aggies and about 103K residents, and is located on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. Whenever I see such a geological manifestation, it means only one thing - sunsets have the potential to be spectacular. It’s where the last vestiges of the sun setting to the west, often crown the mountain peak to the east, in glorious sunset glows. During our evenings in Las Cruces, we chased after pretty sunsets. The weather gods did not disappoint us. We see some of the prettiest skies and cloud formations, that we have seen in quite some time. What do you think?
Organ Mountains Sunset, Las Cruces, New Mexico
Las Cruces Sunset - Christmas 2020
Our Lady of Health Church, Las Cruces
It’s Day Three, and time for White Sands National Park. I highly recommend it, but bring your best sunglasses, because 228 squares miles of pure white sand reflects a lot of light. This place is unique and always triggers a wonderful memory for me. It reminds me of my days at Cornell in Ithaca, NY, where it’s tradition to steal a meal tray from The Straights dining hall and use it to slide down the very long and steep hill in the middle of campus. If you go to White Sands, buy one of these sled-like plastic thingy at the gift shop and go sledding down one of the very steep sand slopes. It’s a fun activity that many families enjoy in this geological and photography wonderland. I have so many pictures from my previous backpacking and camping trips here, that this time around, I mostly take selfies with Vivien. This is her first time visiting the park. Another one of her travel bucket list item now in the bag. As a bonus, she also has all my wonderful pictures as record proof.
It’s Day Four and time for some off-roading and Dam-peeping. I love making up words, proper English be dammed. Unlike Vivien, a Downton Abbey fan, I’m not.
Off-Roading near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
While Vivien reluctantly loads up on her Dramamine, I check and make sure I had brought along a tow rope, an extra blanket, jumper cables and water. Just in case. You know, two Black people stranded in a desert just south of Nowhere Hicksville is not Vivien’s idea of Happy Holidays. I still fashion myself as a bit of a mischievous boy-scout type, and knowing that Vivien doesn’t do off-roading, today is the real reason I drove our 4-wheel drive SUV on this trip. We are going off-roading and get to rough it up a bit. I gave her no advanced warning, else she might have stayed back at the hotel. I laugh to myself - great, we are now even; that’s what she gets for throwing out my hiking shoes from her more than ample “boots only” duffel bag. We Hubbies, we always find a way.
It’s an hour past daybreak on Christmas Eve, and we claim the empty road for ourselves. Have you ever seen a car commercial, where a single vehicle winds its way up the side of a mountain, a sexy Colgate-white-toothed couple smiling from ear to ear, with love twinkling in their eyes? That is Vivien and me, as we make our way up route 51, an S-Curved serpentine path, on our way to Elephant Butte Dam and beyond. The dam, built in 1912, is massive and chokes off a portion of the Rio Grande, providing electricity to both Mexico and the Southwest, and fun to house-boat loving New Mexicans. We have the place mostly to ourselves. Yeah baby, enormous structures make for interesting drone shots. And minutes after parking at an overlook a little distance away, the drone is aloft and I’m snapping away.
The Elephant Butte Dam near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
And yes, I’m also humming “I like big dams and I just can’t lie.” I pray for my sins at a Truth or Consequences church on the way back to the hotel. I love these moments when I can tell, before even downloading a single shot, that these pictures are going to be awesome.
The Lake formed by damming part of the Rio Grande,
Day Five and its Christmas, so we take the day off. We sleep in. We reminisce about the many Christmases we have spent together. We mark our marital milestones by how we have spent this time of year. We laugh about the times when Vivien (mostly), spent untold sums on gifts for our then baby daughter, only to have her prefer to play with the Wrapping Paper come Christmas morning. We chuckle at all the new parents doing the same thing right now. We laugh about a Sedona white Christmas several years ago, when I accidentally left my $1200 lens on the side of the road up in Flagstaff, and had to drive back one entire hour to get it. Luckily, I found it, right where I left it, covered by a thin blanket of snow. I think about the last Christmas I spent with my mother 15 years ago. She died 15 days into the new year. Her memories always flood my mind during the Christmas season. We plan potential trips for next Christmas, as if this virus will be an uncertain part of our lives, while still hoping otherwise. It’s evening and we eat a big Jamaican Christmas dinner - rice and peas, fried plantains, oxtail and cabbage. I wash it down with a Red Stripe and an extra large slice of a delicious Jamaican cake, sent to us by a dear friend (you know who you are - many Thanks).
Day Six, and it’s another Repositioning Day. We travel the 230 miles, due north on I-25, from Las Cruces to Albuquerque. The road is mostly empty, the landscape desert barren, its beauty encrusted in the terracotta pinks and brownish reds of sandstone hoodoos bathed in the morning’s light. We see all kinds of shapes in the rock formations along the highway. Elephants, dogs, a football helmet, a silhouette of Abe Lincoln’s pronounced nose. I see twice as many of these phantom figures as does Vivien. I am happy when she actually agrees with me that a particular rock face looks like a dog’s head with floppy ears.
The Desert of Southern New Mexico
Lunch Break - Stretch Walk for Viv, Drone Flying for me - Southern New Mexico
We try a relative new for Vivien, podcast. It’s called This is Uncomfortable. It has the hook-line, “Life and how money messes with it.” We like it, and both agree it’s a bad idea to hide your $14K credit card debt from your debt-free, frugal checkbook balancing soon to be husband. But he married her anyway, after a pre-wedding confessional. We wish them both good luck. Another uneventful pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint. We’re Black, they barely glance at us before waving us through. In this part of the country, they always assume we are Americans from Detroit or Philly.
The weather messes with our plans for days 7 -10 of our trip. Heavy snowfall in the high country has us doing a blitz tour, Vivien calls it a detour of Santa Fe and Taos. After 21 years of living in the Valley of the Sun, I have become soft. I have lost my ability to drive in the snow without fear, trembling and trepidation. We decide to skip El Paso, and to cut short the Santa Fe and Taos portions of the trip. There is safety at lower elevations. But, onwards to Taos we drive, snow will not stop us. The drive along both the Low and High Road to Taos from Santa Fe is a must for any serious road trip through the Southwest. Despite my chicken driving, we love our abbreviated trip, and I get some of the best pictures of the journey.
The Rio Grande along the Low Road to Taos, Near Dixon New Mexico
Wintertime on The Low Road to Taos, New Mexico
Taos is a neat little old Pueblo. It’s watched over by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which means the “Blood of Christ,” in Spanish. On this trip, it wasn’t red, but snowcapped white. A less affluent version of Sedona, is how I would describe it. These are not “normal” times, and so the joys of slowly wandering the Pueblo Taos and the attached cemetery, and all the centuries old adorable churches were just not possible or advisable. Instead, we slow cruise through town, but stay in our car, and pray for better times ahead.
A Cemetery with an Awesome “Headstone” in Embudo New Mexico
One place where we do get out of our car is the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, because it’s well worth seeing. We walk part-way across it, and this is where we get the closet to other humans in the last 7 days. Everyone is masked-up, even in the great outdoors, and that’s good. If you are afraid of heights, stay in the parking lot, the views are still beautiful from there. If you suffer from suicidal ideations, please get help and stay in downtown Taos instead. There is no safety net here and the chance of survival is zero. The Rio Grande runs a deep brownish green in the depths below, what was at one time, America’s 2nd highest bridge. However, if you want to get that same feeling as when walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, then drive the extra 10 miles from downtown Taos to see it. We have already made plans to come back. It will be at the end of winter, the mountains still covered with snow, the roads clear, and the hiking along the trail that runs along the lip of the Gorge will be a not-to-be-missed appointed therapy session with nature.
The Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, near Taos New Mexico
Traveling along the Low Road to Taos renews my appreciation for the Rio Grande River. It often takes a back seat to the Colorado and the Mighty Mississippi rivers. Even the Columbia River Gorge gets more love around these parts. But this shouldn’t be. Within New Mexico, the Rio Grande is a wonder to behold, it’s S-Curves guiding the way to the many churches and Pueblos of Taos and beyond
The Rio Grande near Pilar New Mexico
We hike the city parks of Albuquerque and drive around the campus of the University of New Mexico. One of our many common quirks is that we both love strolling college campuses. It’s a reminder of our past, when our love was young and carefree, our whole lives stretched out in front of us.
The highlight of our time in Albuquerque is hiking through Elena Gallegos Park, in the shadows of the Sandia Mountains to the north. On the day our visit, it was as if angry angels had just touched the mountain. There were blustery winds, a damp mist and snow showers, all within a 1/2-hour span. We ate lunch in our car and waited out this temporary wintry ferocity. What followed were calm and gorgeous bursts of sunshine, beams of light streaking through puffy white low-hanging clouds. Perfect hiking weather.
The Sandia Mountains, Albuquerque New Mexico
Elena Gallegos Park, Albuquerque New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico
On the last 2 days of the trip, we first repositioned along I-40 Westbound to Flagstaff. Then from there we took I-17 home. A long 450 miles in two days, but all-the-while we still basked in the afterglow of a lovely break from our life in lock-down.
We are back home now, with many miles traveled, another journey completed. Rested and satisfied.
Perhaps my epitaph for 2020 is that I am blessed to still be among the living. Vivien and I survived, even thrived. We cherish the memories of those who have gone on before us. Yet here we are, still healthy and happy, and making plans to travel boldly along the road ahead.
Welcome 2021. Your arrival has been eagerly awaited.
Blessings to y’all my friends. And until next time, I bid you peace.
Derrick