Cause it’s soon one morning down the road I’m gone…Canned Heat

I know that at least one of you thought that I’d go with Willie (although I really just couldn’t wait to be on the road again).

An early morning start boosted me out of Santa Fe and across the last third of New Mexico. I finished off the last of the San Felipe to Algodones (it means cotton, check your bilingual T-shirt labels) 1926-1932 alignment, mostly unpaved. Following that, I wrapped up the pre-1937 track through Albuquerque and then an unpaved alignment from Correo to Mesita. The last bit of non-mainstream New Mexico alignment was a tiny 2.1 mile section from Budville to Cubero.

There are many different pueblos in NM. Some have stood for a least 400 years and are still occupied. I had the privilege of riding many of their dirt streets and talking to several residents. Cultural coincidences are always cool to find and today was no exception. Several years ago I visited my grandfather’s boyhood home in Conflenti Italy. The forno is their form of outdoor oven for baking all bread-based items. A forno is a hemishperical masonry oven that, once brought up to temperature, will hold and maintain the heat for a long day of baking. While cruising around the pueblos today I saw many of these same type of ovens. Some backyards even boasted up to three. I brought this up in conversation with a few residents and they told me that those are their “hornos”. Yet another item proving that the Spanish Conquistadors were influential here, and that “latin blood (forno) is latin blood (horno)”.

Picking up an extra hour in Arizona, I decided to ride late today and that enabled me to progress to Holbrook. This is the first state that I depart, then cross again in both the outbound and inbound segments of this trip, although in very different areas. I rode a 1931 alignment from Lupton to Houck and then diverted through the Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert. A picture being worth a thousand words, I’ll stop right here and you can start scrolling down. As always, you can click on a photo to get the full-sized version.