The small towns are all variations on the same theme from the road; it's not until you stop that you can distinguish between them, and what reason is there to stop in any of them? Well, we found a reason -- the van was pulling to the right, so we turned into a Goodyear Tire place in Dumas, Texas, for new front tires (ours were dangerously worn) and a realignment.
While we were waiting for the Goodyear guys to work their magic, we had lunch at Cathy's Cafe down the road a block or so. The waitress knew everyone's name except for ours ("So, where y'all from?" She didn't know us, therefore we were obviously out-of-towners) and the cook ("My car broke down in Dumas twenty years ago, and I've been here ever since") juggled and tossed his knives between orders. The food was standard American Diner, your weekly cholesterol quota in one meal. Fried chicken and cornbread and corn and mashed potatoes with white gravy "you could patch a tire with" (said Britt), and bread pudding for dessert.
We waddled out and over to the Moore County museum. The museum director's accent was British rather than Texan; we figured her car, too, must have broken down in Dumas some years ago. The small museum's highlight was its collection of barbed wire, which sounds a little weird but was actually kind of nifty. Two walls were covered with several hundred18-inch or so sections of different types of barbed wire, each neatly labeled with its provenance and date of patent.
We returned to the Goodyear guys, paid them for saving us from spending the rest of our lives in Dumas, and hit the road again.
During our yard sales, our hectic preparation for leaving Boulder, and while getting our storage shed together in Bayfield, we gave thanks that the weather gods were on our side. Every day was unseasonably warm and clear and snowless. Well, our record was ruined when we left on our road trip.
We woke from our first night in the campground at Chaco Culture NHP (New Mexico) to a cold and gray day. Our tours through the Anasazi ruins were made less enjoyable by a cold drizzle, which changed to light snow as we headed over the Jemez mountains to Los Alamos. There, our friend Mike gave us some floor space, saving us from camping in the snow -- at least for that night.
We window-shopped in Taos, then drove east. It started snowing again on the way, and we considered just getting a motel room in Raton, but by the time we got there it was deceptively clearing, so we kept on toward the Capulin Volcano NM, halfway between Raton and Clayton. This turned out to be a mistake; big trucks and SUVs with Texas plates whizzed dangerously close and fast, the snow and wind increased, and by the time we hit the turnoff for Capulin, we were in a full-fledged blizzard.. Unsurprisingly, the park was closed (we couldn't even make out the volcanic cone from the visitor's center parking lot) so we went back to a pull-out on the road right near the entrance and set up to spend a cold and snowy night.
The next morning, Britt had to clear ice from the accelerator cable before we could proceed to the Capulin NM visitor's center, which was still closed, due to the weather. The snowplow-driving ranger let us in, though, so we could use the restrooms and the pay phone; we called the nearest highway patrol station and they helpfully informed us that the road between Raton and Clayton was closed, and the storm was currently hammering Kansas. Snow was no longer actually falling, though, so we took our chances on the road, which turned out to be perfectly plowed and perfectly empty. We crossed the Texas border under clear skies and turned toward our rendevous with Dumas.