Thursday, March 28, 2013
Travel day from Santa Fe to Lubbock, TX. This was one of the more boring days of the trip, as the countryside was for the most part not particularly scenic or colorful. Gone were the great promontories overlooking our drive from the left as we were traveling through. The land was flat, or almost so, with only the occasional hill to relieve the visual similarity. The early part of the trip still had some of the junipers in great fields, and, of course, the trains kept us company as we went along, but the junipers gave way to grassy fields with the occasional greenery interwoven in, and the fields became farms.
Most of this trip was through New Mexico, although the last 88 miles were through Texas. One thing that really struck me was that almost as soon as we got into Texas, just beyond Clovis, NM, the ranches / farms immediately were all dominated by the huge above-ground extended irrigation pipes set up triangular supports. Each support had wheels at their bases to enable the whole to move across the fields. These structures were not part of the landscape in NM, but once in TX, there was not any point in time where at least one wasn’t visible, or so it seemed.
The towns are located at regular distances from each other, once we got into Texas. We travelled on the US 84, not the interstate (I40), as it was quicker and while the road was not divided highway, it had a 65 MPH speed limit on it, and the distance was considerably shortened by using these roads. While I am mentioning speed limits, AZ and NM have 75 MPH limits on their divided highways, without seeming to differentiate for trucks. Thus trucks sped along at a great rate. Texas seems to continue that policy, but their top speed appears to be 70 MPH, like California’s.
We got to Lubbock, and after getting a late lunch, we decided to go see the Buddy Holly museum. It is a very nicely set-up museum, and described with relevant paraphernalia on exhibit the life and impact of Buddy Holly. It was interestingly done, with description, and almost a day-for-day record of Buddy’s activities in his professional music life. It was a very short one professionally (18 months from the signing with Decca records to his untimely death in an airplane crash), but he was a musician / songwriter from a very young age. The thing I didn’t know about his history was the impact he had on those who followed him. The museum makes it clear that the approach to rock music that followed was heavily influenced by him. Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, among others all spoke about how the way he handled his guitar, and the way his songs were structured, as well as the way his group (the Crickets) handled the music was so striking that they emulated it in their initial music. Buddy and the Crickets did tours in England and Australia, which solidified their international reputation, and enabled those who came after to watch him in action.
We came back to a suite at the Holiday Inn Express here, and have been enjoying ourselves trying to figure out what we will see in Dallas/Fort Worth tomorrow and Saturday!
Bearded Wonders 