I glossed over the rest of Day Seven a little too fast, so a few things I wanted to add…
I didn’t realize how mountainous and high New Mexico is — I spent much of the day at well over 6,000 feet of elevation, going over 7,000 at times, and a huge chunk of the time I was on little, twisty mountain roads. The downside to this is that New Mexico is very, very conservative with its speed limits and tends to have cops out everywhere; the upside is that little twisty roads are a serious blast to drive in this car. The mountains also look qualitatively different from Arizona or Colorado; they have this interesting combination of Arizona-like desert buttes and yet also a certain lush greenness to them, at least at this time of year. It makes you feel remote but not in a desolate wilderness, which is a neat feeling.
(Another snapshot below: more strip mining in New Mexico. I probably just come across sounding like an obnoxious northern-California environmentalist, although compared to many in Berkeley I’m very far from being a radical environmentalist, but…it’s still staggering to me to come across these places. You can’t see the scale of things, but there are 30-foot-high trucks in the bottom of that mine that look like pinheads from where I am. They’ve literally sunk pits in the earth as deep as the mountains are tall, and tiered the mountains into unrecognizability. Definitely a lesson worth learning — all the raw materials for all the stuff I use and buy does come from somewhere, after all.)
Above all, though, I came to realize this: northern New Mexico is someplace I could definitely see myself living some day. (Maybe if I get to the point where I want to have, you know, an actual house, and haven’t had a random lucky $2 million windfall, it’s a good alternative to the Bay Area.) Seriously, it has a great combination of having cities that are big enough (Albuquerque is 400,000+) to have interesting things going on in them, but still being enough in the mountains and wilderness to let that mountain spirit seep into your soul, and just generally a very livable place. It’s not blazing hot like Arizona, but it’s not insanely cold and snowy in the winter, either; you feel like you can really be part of the outdoors, rather than insulated from it (à la the air-conditioned house/car/office bubbles in Phoenix or the heated bubbles in Minneapolis). I haven’t spent enough time here to know for sure, but it unquestionably has some serious appeal to it.
Finally…like always, it was really rather fun to get chased across New Mexico by thunderstorms. I so miss real weather. Northern California has incredible weather for getting out and doing stuff, but there’s nothing like blazing heat, falling snow, or the sheer power of a summer thunderstorm to let you know you’re alive.
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