hemingway – OsteoPraxis on the road

Having had a quite fabulous time investigating the New Mexico landscape….. the official Route 66 attractions from this section of the road were beckoning. It was another backtracking trip……but one where the road (old highway 66) was actually in fairly good condition.

We drove all the way back to Casa Blanca, New Mexico for the Budville Trading Co. . It sounds very grand…but in reality it’s remote, desolate and, as with much of the 66 ‘attractions’….derelict.

Bud Rice and his wife opened the service station in 1928…Bud was the only towing service for many miles….and also became the Justice of the Peace. Apparently, he had a reputation for issuing hefty fines for minor infractions by unsuspecting travelers…….Ultimately, he was shot and killed in a robbery in 1968. Sounds like just the sort of colourful character and behavior you’d expect out here in the wild west.

Budville yielded a little collection of crumbling buildings and signs.

Next town on the return drive west was Villa de Cubero….another unexpected little gem of history.

This was a great little trading post/’tourist court’… (motel and convenience store..!!)…built in 1937 when the route was realigned and paved……still in operation. We scored some locally milled blue corn flour here…. 😁. But the history of this place was more impressive than that…

This place is also a little motel….

…..and reputed to be where Hemingway stayed while he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea”. If one wanted solitude to write this is the place, no busier now than it would have been then.

There were a few stops along the road for old signage often buried in trees……

…and some spectacular landscape vistas.

Among the attractions listed in the 66 route guide are the old pueblos in Acoma, but with a request/warning not to photograph them. It was our first encounter with some of these quite ancient dwellings. The construction is quite simple but still has that “grown out of the earth’ feel that is so much New Mexico.

We took a drive up to the Santa Maria Mission…(where we were allowed to photograph)…..the view from here down the valley was breathtaking…and impossible to photograph the scale.

Our journey brought us back down through Grants, where the entire town is a veritable neon sign/motel graveyard in its own right.

Scott had lots of fun leaping out of the truck and wandering round some of these (very sketchy) sites. Grants is a place which really exemplifies the short history of Route 66 from humble beginings, to hey day and in short order to what you see here.