Road Trip Heading East; Santa Fe and Tucumcari, New Mexico

Blue Swallow Motel, Tucumcari, New Mexico.  Each room comes with its own garage!  In this case for a 1957 Hudson.
I've never seen this anywhere else in all my travels.  This color treatment was with the Classic Chrome Film Simulation.
I thought that Classic Chrome was entirely appropriate for the subject matter. (click to enlarge)
Fujfilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 29mm; 1/110th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200

This morning, still feeling the effects of suffering from colds, we did manage a decent night's sleep.  Always a good way to start the day.  We packed our things, grabbed some coffee from the hotel lobby and headed out of the door on our way to Santa Fe.

Santa Fe is an upscale, smaller city (~83,000 population) filled with art galleries, specialty shops, tourism sites and lots of visitors.  That translates to artists who think a lot of themselves, traffic, congestion and high prices for everything.  I had no desire to visit Santa Fe again since I had been there a few times in the past, toured the city, photographed and kept my wallet hidden.  However, my wife wanted to visit as she had never before visited and since we needed to drive through Santa Fe to follow to my planned route east for the day, we stopped for a couple of hours.

Basically, the routine is that when my wife wants to shop, I sit in the van, read or listen to podcasts, while she does whatever it is she does when she shops.  I find the time enjoyable, educational and she enjoys shopping (gathering).  My idea of shopping is to get on the Internet and find what I need, either at Amazon.com or another site, order it and greet my delivery person in 2 days with my order.  I do try to support local businesses whenever I can.  I still do the research on the Internet, then drive to the business, buy what I need, then return home.  I'm not a gatherer, I guess.  I'm a hunter.  In the case of Santa Fe, I found a shady bench in the central plaza looking for interesting situations with people to photograph.  I was largely unsuccessful.  But it was pleasant weather and enjoyable just sitting and not driving because of—that infernal cold!

These two ladies were just standing in the central
plaza for the longest time and looked very
happy!  Not sure what their secret is. (click to enlarge)

When my wife was finished shopping, I plotted a route to Tucumcari, my desired destination for the day.  I've been to Tucumcari in northeastern New Mexico three times prior and I like the little town.  It is only a shadow of its former self as when the Federal Government built Interstate 40, it bypassed around the town.  That ruined the businesses on old Route 66 and the town is lucky to still be around.

That being said, there are still remnants of the glory days of Routes 66, most famously, the Blue Swallow Motel.  The Blue Swallow is still open for business, largely looking as it did in its hayday with colorful adobe walls, brightly painted outdoor furniture and, get this, an automobile garage for each room!  The garages are narrow as they were constructed when cars were much narrower than they generally are today.  There are many other old hotel signs, garages and other structures, some still open but most closed, which are photogenic.  I've built up a nice little group of old Route 66 photos from this small city.

The two places I have eaten in Tucumcari are Del's Restaurant and K-bob's Steakhouse.  I've had good meals in both of them.

Front of the Blue Swallow in late afternoon sun. (click to enlarge)
Fujfilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 16mm; 1/950th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200

Back to our colds and feeling miserable.  After we arrived in Tucumcari, checked into our hotel, made some photographs toward the end of the day and settled into our room, it was at this time that we just looked at each other and said, "let's just go home."  Home is where you want to be when you aren't feeling well and we just wanted to be home.  The colds didn't seem to be going away.

The ownership has these color old style metal outdoor chairs in front of the rooms.  Provia Film Simulation (click to enlarge)
This place is a photographic treasure and management encourages visitors.
Fujifilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 34mm; 1/1900th sec. @ f/5.6; ISO 200

I plotted out the 4 days it would take us to get home from Tucumcari.  Day 1 would be from Tucumcari to Shawnee, Oklahoma (407 miles/655km) .  My goal was to get east of Oklahoma City so I didn't have drive through the city during morning rush hour traffic.  For day 2, I planned to drive from Shawnee to Jackson, Tennessee, again to get east of Memphis and avoid traffic (521 miles/838km).  Day three would take us from Jackson to Asheville, North Carolina (422 miles/679km) and Day 4 would get us back home in southeastern Virginia (434 miles/698km).  The route basically followed Interstate 40 across the U.S., which as you know, I like to stay off the Interstate highways, but we wanted to get home as quickly as we could.  All in all, 1784 miles/2870km in 4 days is not what I call a holiday or vacation drive!  

By the time we actually returned home, we had pretty much recovered from our colds.  In fact, on the last day in North Carolina, I was looking for an excuse to not go straight home and to find something to visit and photograph in the North Carolina mountains before the inevitable return to our home and routines.  But there was no color and nothing I could think to visit that I hadn't before visited.  So home it was.

The last images I made on the trip were in Tucumcari.  In my next post, I'll have a wrap up of the trip, what worked and what didn't work so well as well as some stats on what gear I used for what, how many images with each system, the lenses I used most and what I would do differently.  

It is good to be home but I'm pretty much ready to go again.  To me, traveling and wandering is infectious.

Join me over at Instagram @dennisamook or my website, www.dennismook.com. 

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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