Day 9 Updated: Lubbock to Santa Fe

We woke up in Lubbock and headed directly for the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame.


It was a tiny little plaza with a Buddy Holly statue and an inoperable fountain dedicated to the victims of a tornado that swept through Lubbock almost 40 years ago.




There were plaques along a low wall commemorating Lubbock’s favorite sons and daughters of the arts.










It was quite a pretty little park area.


However, it quickly became depressing when I turned around and looked across the street.


Ugh!

Lubbock appears to be an incredibly depressed town with many vacant businesses and lots of really decrepit neighborhoods. It was also Sunday, so the town looked particularly deserted.

We decided to get some lunch until the Buddy Holly Center opened at 1. We drove all over creation looking for a restaurant that sold Texas barbeque on Sunday, but we, of course, found nothing. We did take a drive past Texas Tech University, which was really quite lovely with its Spanish style buildings with terra cotta tiled roofs.


We did see some weird things like this:


After our fruitless restaurant search, we found ourselves in the Buddy Holly Center parking lot eating sandwiches from our picnic basket. Cheap AND delicious!

The Buddy Holly Center was much better than I had expected. It outlined his 22-year life and his 18-month music career in great detail. It also featured many artifacts of his life and career.


We then went to the American Wind Power Center (ie: Windmill Museum). Lubbock is in the heart of the great American Wind Belt or some such nonsense. We saw TONS of windmills both inside and out. We'd been seeing them in the fields on the road, so Dave wanted to see what the story is. Here's a peek at what we saw inside:


This one was pretty weird, so Dave couldn't help but document it.


It's almost as if they were saying, "There were lots of black people in this part of the country. Since you may be unfamiliar with black people, here are some examples to help you spot them in the future."

Here's a look at some of the things we saw in the yard outside the center.





It luckily all culminated in a visit to one of those modern power-generating windmills we saw.


Here's a little lesson on perspective:
NEEEEEEEEEAR!


FAAAAAAAAAAR! (That's me waving at the bottom.)


From there, we headed to the Lubbock City Cemetery to find his grave.


It was just a simple headstone where people had left behind trinkets. A sign nearby mentioned that it was customary to leave a guitar pick to "keep the music alive." We had none, so we left none.


On the way out of Lubbock, we passed a few weird things.



These were both on a lawn at the corner of an intersection. We saw another fighter plane on someone else's lawn later.

We then began our long trek to Santa Fe which, I think, is merely a stop on our way to Sedona or the Grand Canyon or somewhere. New Mexico is gorgeous. We could look in all directions on this highway and see nothing. Maybe a tree, maybe a mesa in the distance, maybe a cow or two. We actually did see a small herd of cows comingling with a few llamas. That was nifty.

While I called my dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day two time zones away, Dave found a Mexican restaurant in the tiny town of Fort Sumner. We had “green Apache tacos,” which are fried flour tortillas topped with beans, guac, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, and black olives. DELICIOUS! (They also had delicious tater tots.)



Then came the most incredible sunset I’ve ever seen. It was so great that we pulled over to listen to the silence of New Mexico and watch the sky. The biggest sky I’ve ever seen and ever thought possible.


It was quite spooky once it got dark because there are no lights anywhere. We didn’t know if we were in the woods or surrounded by water or what. We finally reached the campground I had reserved from the road and realized that we needed a converter of some kind if we were going to use the power outlet available.


(I took this so we could go shopping for a converter.)

So where is the first place we go in Santa Fe? Why, Wal-Mart, of course. Holy cow was that place crowded at 11 pm on a Sunday night! Wally World did not have what we wanted, so we decided to forget about the electricity and just wing-it. We then spent 30 minutes trying to put the giant tent/diaper on the back of the van. I couldn’t find the directions until we were almost "done."

So here I lie in the back of the van with the power in my computer about to go out, a strange dog lurking outside out car-tent, and the biggest bugs in tarnation crawling around. I’ll post an edited version with pictures tomorrow. Too tired. Computer dying.