…which, of course, he pissed on
Critter Con 14
The Trip Home Day 1: In which we are on a leisurely drive home and make stops for food, sightseeing and bears
Our trip home started about 20 minutes after the pie party last night. We sent our friends home, then just sort of hung out as our autopilot, Data, drove us to our stop for the night in Loving, New Mexico. By the time we arrived there, Grace, Sasha, Sam, and I were all fast asleep.
The kitchen staff on the Bus made a great breakfast for us as we traveled up State Route 285 to Taos, about 5.5 hours away, but more like 7.5 including stops. We aren’t planning any roadside attraction stops, but you never know what might catch our eye.
And what caught our eye was a group of Star Trek characters, built from scavenged lumber, about 3 miles north of a place called Midway. We’ve seen such art before, most noticeably on the mud flats not far from the Oakland end of the Bay Bridge, but we’ve never seen recognizable characters there.
Here, you had Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and a Klingon. They were all about 10 or 12 feet tall and looked like they had been there several years, judging from their paint. We took pics of ourselves posing with them and then got back on our merry way.
In Roswell, a city that really plays up the whole alien crash site thing, we stopped at Good Books, a used book store run by our friends Ross and Nellie, who are, in fact, aliens. Carivornans, to be precise. Fine folks who volunteered to come live on our little ghetto planet as part of GalSec Watch. They mostly just make sure that humans have not invented the wrong things (FTL travel, advanced robotics, etc) and that Sasha does not build another Lulu.
We had a nice hour long visit and Ross sold me a few Doc Savage paperbacks for five bucks. I gave him a jar of spicy pickled tomato hornworms. We were both pleased.
Having been through New Mexico several times, we did not stop often for photos. We did stop near the intersection of 285 and I-40 (formerly Rt.66) for a nice lunch of fish & chips, prepared by none other than Jeeves himself, because “one should have a proper fish and chips”. And they were!
We were about halfway to Taos when we got word via the NHT internet that a mother bear and her three cubs needed some help. Since Sasha was the closest NHT doctor, we detoured up into the mountains to offer aid.
The mother bear, Genola, had three pretty sick cubs on her hands, so while she sat in the living room with us drinking berry juice, Sasha got the cubs to Sick Bay and gave them the once over. She then reported to us that the cause of the cubs badly upset tummies was the fact that they had eaten too much fruit from an apple tree. She gave them some medicine and a mild sedative and then we carted them to a temporary den that Genola had.
She thanked us profusely and we left her a large pile of special food bars that would help her and the cubs pack on some extra winter fat.
In Taos, we pretty much did the tourist thing and wandered around the downtown plaza for an hour or so. We didn’t buy anything. Since it was getting on near 7:00, we decided to have burgers and shakes at a local joint before leaving on the 4 hour leg to Durango, Colorado. They were damned tasty burgers.
And now it is 11:00 and we are parked just south of Durango, on the bank of the Animas River. Tomorrow, we will be on our way to Las Vegas.
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