A Stop in the High Desert
After getting back from Puerto Rico, I was in MA for about three weeks, just long enough to do my taxes, attend a couple of D&D games, and sing at the Asphodel Ostara ritual. Then I was off again, doing the long drive back to TerraSante.
One of the first lessons I had to relearn was to never do trip planning when it's 3 a.m. and you can't sleep. All the map apps estimate drive time based on current conditions, and the current conditions at 3 a.m. generally involve nearly empty roads. The same trip in the daytime can take half again as long. On the first day of the trip, from Hubbardston, MA, to Harrisburg, PA, there were two crashes on I-84 that slowed traffic to a crawl. The first one I was able to dodge using surface roads, but the second one was just before the bridge, and there just aren't that many bridges over the Hudson River.
Then as I was passing through Scranton, the storm started. It was one of those massive downpours where, if you try to go over 55, you start to aquaplane. And did I mention the fog? The Prius doesn't have fog lamps, but I picked a big truck that had them and just followed it.
When I finally arrived at my Airbnb, it was 10:30 p.m. and my host had gone to sleep, but she had left the door open for me, which was astonishing considering that the place is a store. Specifically, it's a store that sells art and decor items of a particular aesthetic: semi-fantasy, semi-spiritual, dare I say Neopagan? There was quite a lot of stained glass, a baby grand piano in the front room and two, an old upright and an electric keyboard, in the next room, across a narrow aisle from the couch where I slept, kept company by an elderly cat who was so fat as to be almost perfectly round. In the morning I spent enough time with my host to learn that she is, in fact, a Neopagan, and that we know people in common, mainly through Earthspirit, whose events I used to attend when I lived in Amherst. She is a musician and a stained glass artist and she's in a band called Sofeya & The Puffins.
I went out to get breakfast food and saw that Harrisburg is beautiful on an early spring morning with the mist on the river. Google Maps led me to a natural food shop staffed entirely by Amish women and teenage girls. It was a real local experience.
The next day's drive was from Harrisburg to Cincinnati, another 3 a.m. planning error, but I was too stubborn to cancel and lose the deposit on my Airbnb there. So I tore through the western half of Pennsylvania, the tiny West Virginia panhandle, and the great bulk of Ohio, passing tourist attractions and scenic spots that I would have liked to stop at, eating while driving, and other forms of pushing too hard. That day and night were uneventful, as were the next day and night in St. Louis, and the one after that in Joplin.
It was when I got into Oklahoma that things started to change. I was not under the same pressure because I had not made reservations. Airbnb stopped showing me spare rooms in people's houses and started showing me guest cabins on ranches, quite a distance from the highway and about twice as expensive. On the other hand, motels were plentiful and almost as cheap as the kind of Airbnb I was looking for would have been if there had been any. I got a typical room in Sayre, OK, and then an absolutely perfect one in Santa Rosa, NM. If you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods, I strongly recommend the La Mesa Motel. Using its excellent wifi, I was able to line up another Airbnb in Las Cruces, in another house that is also a place of business. Dezi Golden Therapies offers massage, reiki, chakra balancing, and several other cool things. I booked a full body massage.
I left Santa Rosa yesterday morning and spent most of the day driving through the pinon-juniper forest and ranchland of the New Mexico high desert. By then I was tired enough that I knew I needed to stop every hour or so, get out of the car, and walk around a little. One of those stops was at the tiny village of Corona. It doesn't look like much at first. It seems to exist because it's where Route 54 comes together with a railroad, so there's a station there, and a shallow grid of side streets containing the homes of a grand total of 165 people - but they have a public library. Bet, the librarian on duty when I was there, told me that it was started by a group of retired outsiders who moved there and couldn't believe the area didn't have a library, and didn't see how the kids (85 currently attend the village school, which includes kids who live on the surrounding ranches as well as in the village itself) could get a good education without one. So the village hall offered an unused back room and someone found a federal block grant and someone else bought some solid oak furniture that will still be usable when the preschoolers who were coming for the Easter egg hunt that afternoon are old and gray, and now there's a library with all the basics, including the modern bathroom and wifi that I went in there for. They were also given this found object flamingo sculpture that they dress up with a different theme every month.
Bet at the front desk, Corona Public Library. Note the Easter Eggs, not well hidden from an adult point of view, but the hunters are expected to be shorter than the desk.
Book Bird Investigates: Snakes Reptiles & Amphibians
So I rolled on down to Las Cruces, which is about three times the size it was the last time I was here (for one night in 1977). I found Dezi Golden Therapies and guess what? They're Neopagan, too! Like, the whole family. I received my massage, not from Dezi herself, but from Jackie, one of the junior massage therapists, who is a total genius. If you're ever in Las Cruces and in need of a massage, I definitely recommend her.