The land that I love—New Mexico. It just keeps giving. Miracle and I sit down with our road atlas—the perfect wedding gift from our dear friend, Raj—and simply pick a route. We go. Miracle googles stuff and we read road signs; we talk to locals and pick up brochures. We drive and we detour.
That’s how we ended up in a ghost town called Kelly. It has a 120-foot mining scaffold from the 1800s—a kit actually that mining operations could buy.
Down from Kelly was Tumbleweed’s Diner where we stopped for the best burger I have ever had. As we were sitting there gorging ourselves after the ghost town hike, a guy named Bale came over and introduced himself. He’s an artist and he was having a how opening that night at a gallery called Kind of a Small Array. He invited us and we of course went.
If you’re familiar with this area in New Mexico, you know the gallery name is a play on the Very Large Array outside of town. We stopped (and got stopped by security) for photos.
We drove on to the see the natural sites over the next few days: Ventana Arch, the cinder cone and ice cave (for real—20 foot-thick ice in a naturally 31-degree year round cave).
We then hiked the bluff trail in gale force winds at El Morro—a sandstone and freshwater oasis mesa where Native Americans, Spanish soldiers, then early settlers essentially stopped to write their names. It’s really cool, but also funny when you stop to think about the common things humans have done through all of time: stop to put our name on something.
On the Road with Adie 