So, we're home, with bags of pinon nuts and cans of green chile and our very own ristra made of pequin peppers. We LOVED New Mexico!
This trip, the live-blogging experiment lasted only three days, or the amount of time it took us to get to Santa Fe and meet up with old friends from college.
Last Friday, the day started in Capitan, New Mexico, home of the first real live Smokey the Bear. Matter of fact, we stayed in the terrifically American Smokey Bear Motel, complete with its own smokey statue right out front on 380. You can park right in front of your well-appointed room, complete with perfectly accessible internet and comfortable bed.
In New Mexico, we had to have green chile at least once a day. So, we got off to a good start with home fries and eggs and green chile. This one was unlike any of the other versions we tried throughout the state - more like a spicy bechamel, or white sauce. Love.
Then, off to Lincoln! Lincoln was the site of an honest-to-goodness Wild West crazytime known as the Lincoln County War in 1877 and 1878. Though "war" is a bit of hyperbole, it's true that combatants including the sheriff were shot down in the streets, homes were burned to smoke out opposing factions, and the Army eventually had to come in to settle things down (though they succeeded in making things way worse).
Here's a good history of the war. DON'T read the Wikipedia entry, unless you plan to edit it. Eesh.
The most famous participant in the War was Henry Antrim. I mean McCarty. Or Kid Antrim. Or William Bonney.
That is, Billy the Kid.
Lincoln now is a quiet town, with the whole main street preserved as a sort of museum to the old times. I don't know how much of the preservation was on purpose, since the town went into a precipitous decline around the turn of the last century, but it's certainly a fun place to wander.
Our first stop was the Lincoln County Courthouse, from where Billy the Kid made a daring escape in 1881, shooting and killing two deputies. There's still a bullet hole in the wall, with a comic-book plastic covering.
POW!
This isn't at all a recreation of what actually happened, but I couldn't have stopped Husbear if I'd wanted to.
The building also had some great artifacts from its days as a store. My favorite primary source:
Democrats will stand up for their right to spit on the floor!
There's also a room dedicated to law enforcement in Lincoln County, including the tommy gun bought by the populace in the 1930s after several of their officers were outgunned by fleeing criminals and a list of the Lincoln County officers killed in duty.
And a jacket.
Vintage 1990s.
Time to see the rest of the town. Many of the buildings house small museums or curio shops or stores selling Billy the Kid stuff or woven blankets. The historical society was closed because the woman who runs it had company in town.
We also saw the town's fortified torreon, built in the 1850's to protect the inhabitants from the local Apache tribes. Sharpshooters hung out there during the war.
Time to leave - many miles to go before we sleep - so we returned to Capitan, to the Smokey Bear Museum/Park/Gravesite. The museum is very sweet, and would be a nice diversion if you were toting around some extra dorky kids. There's a TON of smokey memorabilia, and a nice park where Smokey was laid to rest among examples of New Mexico's different terrains.
There's also a lot of hilarious propaganda from World War Two.
But, the hurrying continued, and we got on the road to Carrizozo. Carrizozo is now Lincoln County's seat, after a 4-year court battle in the early part of the last century. Temperatures were dropping, and I was totally excited to see the museum housed in the frozen foods locker. What? It's right there in the city's tourist literature!
Drat. Closed. So we poked around a wonderful antiques and New Mexican junk store for a little while, then took the road north towards the sometime ghost town of White Oaks, New Mexico.
The town made its money and based its infrastructure off of gold mining, but after the railroad didn't come through, the town withered and almost died. Now, there are some artists that live there, but it's mostly uninhabited - an odd mix, nine miles off the nearest thoroughfare.
We stopped by the cemetery, where several of the people involved in the Lincoln County War are buried. A bible was provided for us, should we want to say anything over the graves.
Though it was getting late in the day, we couldn't leave the town of White Oaks without stopping in for a drink at the No Scum Allowed Saloon. Thankfully, we aren't scum. Usually.
The place calls loudly for a whiskey, I thought, though I somehow let the sweet bartender talk us into a shot of Crown and Hot Damn. She called it Hot Panties. I liked it, but I could never actually ORDER it in a normal bar.
It's a great bar owned and staffed by really nice people, and they have a big dance floor in the back.
But we still had some crazy number of miles to go before Santa Fe. We pulled back onto the county roads.
Most of the way, we were dodging deer. The whole trip was like that - nighttime driving on back roads with deer barely outside the range of our headlights. I did a LOT of gripping the door handles.
We arrived in Santa Fe in the full-on dark, and soon after checking into our Priceline hotel just off the Plaza, one of our friends in town (that we hadn't seen since our wedding in 2004!) came to pick us up. He showed us a yummy time with stuffed spicy chiles and then took us out to a bar near where we were staying. Drinks and talking and yelling and fun ensued.
This is what happens when you leave your drink near us and don't look like you'll be coming back. Beware.
Tomorrow? More Santa Fe! Spicy green chile cheeseburgers. Farolitos. Modern art.
