It was a day to get some miles on the clock of the NISMO 370Z as the Lone Star Le Mans weekend at the Circuit of the Americas closes in.
Before some pounding of Interstates though there was a morning to savour in the Santa Fe National Forest, fabulous driving roads, amazing woodland scenery and home to the widest range of apparently suicidal chipmunks and squirrels known to man (we didn’t hit a single one but had around 40 near misses!). The 370Z is probably close to the ideal car for this sort of driving: quick, sure footed and with excellent forward visibility.
We went looking for a promised lake but didn’t find one, just an entirely random huge black bull in the middle of the forest, we didn’t stop to chat.
About 25 miles into the National Forest we were stopped by a young flag waving lady, accompanied by a very attentive Border Collie.
She warned of road works ahead, and that a goodly proportion of the next 13 miles was dirt road! Oh go on then! In fairness we were VERY sensible, they weren’t kidding when they said there were roadworks, I’ve seen less heavy machinery used to build a motorway.
Yes there was a small degree of opposite lockery on wide open dirt and gravel bends but in 13 miles we passed not one single vehicle coming in the opposite direction.
I tell a lie, at around the 12 mile mark we did pass a vehicle, an officer of the National Parks Service, on a bend where I would estimate that I was doing absolutely no more than 17 or 18 mph. Predictably the Officer decided that he would look into the presence in the park of an out of state registered sportscar and, fair enough, he asked me about my speed.
I reported my point of view, he reported his and we parted as friends after he’d given me possibly the world’s first verbal warning to a NISMO driver for c.17mph in a 20mph zone!
After tippy toeing onwards, yours truly absolutely certain that an all points bulletin for the ‘Foreigner in a sportscar’ would by now be all around the park, we took a moment to savour the vast meadow at the exit of the park, this one of the areas where Elk migrate, none of our heavily antlered friends was visible, though we did see several of their rather smaller cousins during the day.
Now it really was time to make up some ground and after a rather rambling route via Los Alamos, home to the absolutely enormous National Laboratory, the site that will forever be known as the home of a project that would change the world as we know it, no not Balance of Performance, but rather Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, the research that led to the creation of the World’s first viable Atomic Bomb. We didn’t knock to ask if we could look around!
Onto and through Santa Fe then out again onto the sweeping plains, this time home to a combination of simply enormous cattle ranches and later on the gathering oilfields of Southern New Mexico.
The onset of time and fast transport has left casualties in these parts, one town we passed though had only commercial building apparently in use, a Post Office and a Sheriff’s station, Sadly Pedro’s Burritos was very closed indeed! He does get around the wee lad doesn’t he!
We had around 200 miles to cover across these plains and here’s where I learnt something about young Mr Thrasher, he’s a fan of public radio! We learnt more about early word processors, Jazz and a buddy, buddy system of managing debt between working class and middle class Americans than I had ever known before during the first hour, it’s sort of BBC Radio 4 but without the budget, or the broadcasting talent. But it is still a LOT more listenable than any other US talk radio station I have ever yet come across!
Sadly the weather had now closed in and we were treated to some proper rain for the first time this week, by the time we reached our next, and for the day predicted penultimate, way point the streets were flooded. We planned to drive on through but you really, really can’t do that in this place without some form of photo stop. This was Roswell New Mexico and the truth is out there, or something!
There was a further brief stop on the outskirts when we both spotted a number of very large tailplanes off to the right of the Interstate, this was the Roswell International Aviation Center – Originally the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and indeed the location at which the fabled ‘Roswell Incident’ took place.
Nowadays it is mainly used as a storage and disposal location for retired airliners, there were literally dozens in evidence, some seemingly mothballed, others clearly in advance stages of decay and demolition.
It was only later this evening that I realised the facility’s mot recent claim to fame. It was here that Felix Baumgartner’s astounding ‘Jump from Space’ was mounted.
A little further on and there was just a moment to snap an old warbird on a stick, we have no idea why this 1950s Thunderjet is based opposite a petrochemical works but would love to know – There was also a rater more modern interpretation on the same theme in an adjoining kids playground, complete with slide emerging from the jet pipe!
Onwards though until dark! and the final overnight stop in Carlsbad New Mexico, the air now thick with the smell of nearby oil wells, the landscape pocked with ‘Nodding Donkeys’ and from time to time the brightly floodlit drilling rigs.
That proved to be an issue as we looked for room at an inn. Most hotels in this town are block booked for the hard working oil workers, evidenced by a massive concentration of the world’s massive, 4×4 diesel trucks in each hotel parking lot. We made it eventually, and now we’re planning the last stop or two on this odyssey tomorrow, well over 2,500 miles on (and still the Recaros are proving superb) and Austin is now looming large!
