Greetings!
What does March bring to mind for you? For us it means
longer days, changeable weather, boisterous birds in search of nesting
materials, and bare cottonwood trees soon to burst out in bright green leaves.
More often than not when March rolls around, we find ourselves in New Mexico, the
Land of Enchantment – an apt motto for a remarkably varied and lovely state.
Our travels took us to the eastern border, within spittin’ distance of Texas
before we pointed Sierra north and west, our general trajectory for the
duration of this year’s journey. Wishes of springtime joy to you and yours.
Wish You Were Here
Perhaps you have seen plenty of snow for one season. We
encountered enough ourselves, but nothing like the massive white drifts we
drove through in south central New Mexico. These particular “snow drifts”
however, were actually the glistening dunes of White Sands National Monument.
This is a place you have to see to believe, and visitors are actually
encouraged to walk right out among the silky white hills. If you scramble atop
a dune of this powdery white gypsum sand, you can get a feel for the enormity
of the vast, colorless world around you – 275 square miles, to be exact. Always
creeping like slow-motion waves, this ghostly white desert offers special
challenges to plants and animals. We adapted to the harsh surroundings in our
own way, by being careful to keep the sign posts pointing towards the parking
lot clearly in view!
Life on the Road
This year our traveling world contains elements it never did
before – tiny paint color sample cards from Lowe’s and Home Depot (who knew there were so many shades of white?), home
improvement articles torn from unsuspecting magazines and a pad of graph paper
for sketching out house plan ideas. In addition to trips to the gym, library
wifi sessions, Native flute concerts, ukulele practice and RV maintenance, we
now brainstorm about our little cottage in Talent, Oregon. There will be much
remodeling and finishing to undertake, so we are doing all the planning and
decision making we possibly can – you know, without ever having actually been
inside the house! As we mentioned in the announcement of our real estate
purchase, we do not exactly know how the acquisition of a home WITHOUT wheels
will affect our travels, but we do intend to continue having a Life on the Road. Coffee Chat
After one of our concerts in Tucson, a young Navajo lady
came up, pointed to one of our Native flutes and said, “My brother made that
flute.” The one she indicated was the very first Native American flute we had
ever acquired, and during the ten subsequent years of playing that instrument,
we have shared music with many people and made many friends. It is safe to say
that the direction of our lives was significantly affected by the instrument we
call “Little Flute.”
Did You Know?
Nearly half of New Mexico’s two million inhabitants live in
the greater metropolitan area of “The Duke City” – that is to say, Albuquerque.
Now Hear This…
This is a new segment for our BusRoads Buzz blog. We wanted
to let you hear one of the more recent songs we wrote. It is entitled “Each New
Hello” and was composed just before we bought our little house (across the
street from a library.) This link is to our ReverbNation Wayside View page where you can play "Each New Hello" as well as other songs and videos. New Mexico: The Land of Enchantment
