Rat Race Revisited

Who remembers the movie Rat Race (the semi-remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World)? You know, it’s the one where a casino owner sends a bunch of gamblers on a race from Las Vegas, Nevada to Silver City, New Mexico. The owner puts 2 million dollars in a train station locker, then hands each of the gamblers a key to the locker and whoever gets to the train station locker first gets to keep the money.

In the movie they all eventually make it to the train station. In real life, they would have spent the rest of their lives wandering aimlessly around the Silver City desert because, as I recently discovered, there is no train station in Silver City.

Mom has been in town visiting for the past week and taking care of me while I recover from my car accident. We decided to take a road trip this past weekend to escape the blazing heat of summer. We’ve been to every possible destination in Arizona, so we set our sights on our long-forgotten neighbor to the east: New Mexico. Silver City is about 4 hours from Mesa, so it seemed ideal for an overnight road trip. Not to mention, it was basically the nearest town to the east. (Living in Arizona is a lot like being stranded in the desert with 6 million other strandees.)

On our way out of town we stopped at our favorite book store, Changing Hands, to pick up some quick reads for the trip. I’m still on crutches (big surprise there) so a lot of reading and a little hiking was the order of the day.

Our friendly bookstore guide suggested that we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. It was a quick teen read and she said it would have is in stitches laughing. As she was the book expert, we took her up on her suggestion and bought the book. We read half on the way to Silver City and half on the way home. It was a pretty funny book, and its setting was a reservation town which was very fitting as most of our drive was through reservation country. We did find ourselves “yadda, yadda, yadda-ing” our way through quite a few pages of the book in order to keep it G-rated, so I won’t be sending the book on to my nephew to read.

After hours of driving o’er hill and dale and desert we rolled into Silver City, New Mexico. The hustle and bustle of city life was stark change from the long, drawn-out desert drive. Ha ha! Not really. There was no change and there was definitely no hustle or bustle to be found. Like many of the mining towns that dot the landscape, most of the downtown buildings were boarded up, dilapidated, old-timey storefronts that likely hadn’t seen customers since the gold rushes of the 1800s.

We were in the market for a quaint little Bed and Breakfast somewhere on the edge of town. After a long day of internet searching, the closest we came to a B&B was a quaint little KOA Kabin in a Kampground outside of town.

After settling in we drove out to a place called City of Rocks. We drove for miles across rolling hills covered in sagebrush, then out of the middle of nowhere appeared a hill covered in boulders the size of houses. They looked like they had rolled off a mountain or broken from a cliff, except there were no mountains or cliffs around them. It was like a little New Mexican Stonehenge. We drove around the alien rock features and spied in at the little campsites that were nestled between the rocks.

Later that night we thought we’d find a granny-style café for dinner. I pulled up my GPS and within seconds we had a long list of cafes. We picked the first one on the list and drove to the coordinates. It wasn’t there. Never fear, we had our list so off we went to find the second café. It was closed. Number 3: boarded up. Number 4: Not there.... We ditched the GPS and started looking for buildings with lights on in the windows.

We finally found something open… well, I think they were ready to close when we showed up. After all, it was 8:00 on a Saturday night. But, they were hospitable and served us our meatloaf and mashed ‘taters as the scurried around folding up tablecloths and putting the lights out in the rest of the building.

We kozied up in our kamp kabin for the night and listened to the rain plink, plinking on the roof while we watched Rat Race on the laptop.

The next morning we drove up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, nestled inconveniently in the middle of Gila National Forest. I’ve never been on a more winding road. It was definitely not overdeveloped. Poor mom drove all the way to and from the ruins and I think our two greatest feats that day were 1) We didn’t vomit on the drive, and 2) We managed to climb down a ladder on a cliff, each carrying a crutch in one hand. Why I didn’t bring my camera, I don’t know. It was hilarious and I’m sure we had all of the other hikers at the edge of their seats just waiting for us to topple off the ladder...

...never fear. We made it down the ladder, wound our way back down the cliffs, then down the twisting, turning road, o'er hill and dale and desert, and back home to the blazing inferno of Arizona.

It's supposed to be 105 degrees today.