Unfinished Business - Day 1 - Stamps and Plaques

5/16/15, “Stamps and Plaques”

Nageezi, New Mexico (Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Culture National Historical Park)

So much of my domestic travel is focused around Stamps and Plaques, visiting the 401 (well, now it’s 405 or 409, I think) units of the National Park Service.  Sure, most of the sites are wonderful, and I doubt anyone would argue the merit of Yellowstone NP or the Statue of Liberty, but, to me, the true joy is collecting the Stamps and Plaques.  However, I often forget to stop and smell the roses, to thoroughly enjoy where I am, to think that I am sitting among Indian ruins that are over a millennium old, as I smoke a Cohiba and listen to “Colors of the Wind” from Pocahontas (oh, the irony).  That is exactly what I am doing now.

After I bought my souvenirs, got my stamps, took my picture with the Plaque, lit up my Punch, took my Official pictures, had a sip of water, did everything I needed to do to Officially check off the WHS, it finally hit me.  The wondrous beauty of where I was made my literally stop in my tracks.  “This is so amazing!” I told Connor with a quaver in my voice.  It is impossible to describe how amazing this place is, and I won’t even try, hoping my pictures will do the trick.  In March, I described the evils of what we did to the Native Americans, how we destroyed a culture, but, if we hadn’t we wouldn’t be here today, being able to explore these ruins, wondering how they might have lived.  It is starting to rain a little, and we have to drive back through on a dirt road, so I’ll be brief.

After I closed last night, my computer died before I published, which I did first thing in the morning.  We got on the road, stopping at Twister’s for breakfast, and it was not long before we lost service.  It was raining, and, recalling what happened on the Dalton last year, I was afraid of the dirt road getting washed out.  It did not.  We made it to the VC, where I took care of the WHS stuff I needed to do.  The main site is where I am, Pueblo Bonito, which was paired with another site.  My plan was to light up my Punch, walk to the first site, take some pictures, walk to the second site, the main one, with my cigar, and then walk around until my cigar was done.  That was exactly what we did, enjoying the sites as we listened to Pocahontas.

I have never been anywhere like this before, well, maybe Mesa Verde, but this was different.  After I finished the cigar, I knew that I wanted to stay here as long as possible, to spend every minute we could before we risked missing the other site.  To that end, as Connor took pictures, I went back to the car to get my laptop and another cigar, ditching the Punch along the way.  I lit up the Cohiba and came back here, where I proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close, as my cigar is almost done, and we need to leave if we want time to stop for lunch.

Taos, New Mexico

Just as my trip with Sokol to Alaska was about more than Stamps and Plaques, so too have Connor have found ways to have fun here in New Mexico beyond Stamps and Plaques.  Whether it was pretending he dropped his phone in the river, singing along to our favorite Disney songs, sharing stories, or making yellow snow in May, to reduce this trip to Stamps and Plaques would be a poor misrepresentation.  After I closed at Chaco Culture we put the Aztec Ruins NM in the GPS, and it showed an arrival time of 2 PM.  I wanted an hour at the site, and it closed at 5 PM.  That put us two hours ahead of schedule, but I wanted to allow for plenty of what I so repeatedly call “Dutch Time.”  We had plenty of that.

Once we got back on the paved road, me having already told Connor what happened on the Dalton, we saw a flatbed truck off the side of the road, with the bed on down below and the cab blocking the entire road.  Fuck!  Our first thought was that the truck careened off the side of the road.  How long would it take for a tow truck to tow the truck away, here in the middle of nowhere?  We soon realized that truck was actually the tow truck, and it was not long before it towed a car away, and we were on our way.  Meanwhile, I was starting to get service again, so I could upload my photos and videos.  I am dead tired, so I will summarize as much as possible, and I am certainly too tired to develop any new philosophy tonight.  I think I really hit on something last night, and I want to work on developing that further.

We stopped at Sonic for lunch, which was right by the Aztec Ruins, and it was 3 PM by the time we got there, but we were still ahead of schedule.  While the NPS treated it as a separate unit, it is still part of the same WHS, much like Glacier Bay and Wrangell-St. Elias.  I, however, for the purposes of stamping, treated it as a separate WHS, and it even had its own Plaque.  We headed to the ruins, where I lit up my Hoyo de Monterrey.  The site was rather underwhelming after seeing Chaco Culture, and a ranger soon told me that I needed to put out my cigar.  The wind quickly extinguished it, and I put it in my pocket before making my way through the rest of the ruins and to the parking lot to finish my cigar.  There was also a gift shop outside the park, which had cheap souvenirs.  Shit, I can’t focus on this, a combination of personal stuff and fatigue, so

I’m really just going to wrap up as quickly as possible.

Connor wanted to go to the river, so we went, and he the brilliant of idea of pretending to drop his phone in the river while I was videoing something and having me then turn the camera to film the splash.  We continued the joke on Snapchat for quite some time.  We stopped again for food at A&W, and now we were on a time crunch to get to the restaurant in Taos before they closed at 9 PM.  Connor wanted to take the scenic route, which turned out to be a mistake.  There was snow on the road.  Mother fucking snow on the mother fucking snow in mother fucking May.  In the end, it only added fifteen minutes to the drive, but we were freaked out, the driving was that rough, telling stories as we drove.

We made it to the restaurant in time, where we had a great meal, a great finish to the amazing day we had.  We went to the hotel, made another stupid Snapchat video, and went out to the porch with our beer and cigars, where I lit up an Aroma de Cuba and proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can publish it and finish my cigar.