Trying Out Travel Writing: New Mexico Day 2
After breakfast the next morning the Braxton Fam departed Albuquerque with Santa Fe as the destination. We were to spend a few hours walking around, killing time before our 4 p.m. check-in at the Glorieta Baptist prison.
On the way toward and into Santa Fe, I was reacquainted with the New Mexican countryside: sparsely vegetated plains stretching for miles with mammoth mountains jutting the horizon; curveless five-mile stretches of interstate, intermittently engulfed by hills and jagged cliffs exploding from nowhere to dwarf the highway. Everything was just as I’d imagined it would be in a desert land: 75 MPH speed limits, an abundance of dusty pickup trucks and dull-colored twenty-year-old campers with any number of chains hanging from them, adobe architecture, grizzled, mustached men with obligatory cowboy hats covering gray locks, tattooed women with hair either shaved or fashioned into dreadlocks, everyone in faded jeans regardless of gender, cacti and endless stretches of rock-protruded soil.
Santa Fe itself seemed anti-New Mexican, flashy and upscale, with lots of expensive shops and markets hawking artsy wares I’d have no interest in even if I were a millionaire (but the thousand-dollar-plus globes fashioned from multicolored glass were eye-catching). Santa Fe’s redeeming quality was the abundance of Mexican restaurants promising authenticity for proximity. After a mile-long search revealed the majority of AAA rated eateries were open only for dinner, a local who'd transformed her body into modern art with myriad tattoos and piercings pointed us toward a restaurant she assured was excellent, if I’m not mistaken taking advantage of the metal rod running through her nose to indicate direction.
Observing no other patrons when we arrived, we entered the noiseless building warily, only to be ushered back out by an accented voice, "No. No open 'till dinner." After a few minutes debate about whose Spanish was least deficient, Sam gathered the courage to seek a recommendation, to which the Mexican staff unanimously approved Tomasita's, gesturing back the way we'd walked, "No far. Block."
Tomasita’s was bustling, and the dining proved worthy of the 15-minute wait for our already famished family. Not only was our waitress a midget – pause, the dictionary informs that ‘person of restricted growth’ is the preferred term – Tomasita’s served truly authentic Mexican food, not the typical Tex-Mex fare that I love but can find back home. The sopapilla, especially smothered in honey and honey butter, was perfect, warm and fluffy and not too greasy. The selection of beers and tequila was encouraging given our travails the night prior, and the Sangria was sweet from fruits with an alcoholic bite. Among other dishes we sampled, I loved my open-faced enchiladas with tender, tasty grilled shrimp; my brother raved about the chiles rellenos; the tacos, served with freshly diced vegetables, a homemade shell, and succulent, presumably marinated, ground beef were – Yes, I’ll admit it – superior to Taco Bell’s in every single ingredient; and New Mexico’s famed green and red chiles lived up to their reputations for flavor and spice as everyone layered one or the other over their food. At the end of the meal I had the same diarrheic urge that Taco Bell inspires, but I was so supremely satisfied I wouldn’t have bemoaned an accident.
My cousins, my brother, and I split off from the adults to find a liquor store, agreeing we’d meet back up at the family reunion. After more than an hour searching, we happened past one as we drove out of town, the first we’d seen. With a limited selection of liquors and expensive prices, but knowing it would be hard to sneak cases of beer into the religious compound and not wanting to embarrass the entire family by being expelled, we settled on one half-gallon and two double-shot airplane bottles (so my brother could drink should we visit another bar) of Smirnoff, and one half-gallon of Jim Beam white label.
At ease for the first time since we’d entered New Mexico, we drove the twenty minutes to Glorieta. We followed directions to the welcome sign and beckoning white gates; passing through, we veered right. As our view opened up we were confronted with masses of teens running around, screaming, playing games and relay races modified with Southern Baptist bents, we were certain. I caught myself before I uttered the whole phrase, sounding instead what might have been mistaken for the uncertain introduction of a first timer's prayer. I doubted my hands were the only ones quivering as I thought about purchases we’d already stowed in our bags in the trunk.
The Baptist resort is enormous. The main road that loops around Glorieta is likely a mile in length, spotted with dorms, dining halls, a restaurant, a Christian store, and activity buildings, among others I never explored or noted, and there were more offshoot roads from the main drive than I cared to notice. According to the brochure, Glorieta is equipped to deal with 20,000 visitors and that didn't seem an exaggeration. There were literally thousands of summer campers milling around, all having arrived in one of the parked busses, cars, or vans with soap scribbled windows illustrating gigantic crosses and reading, “Honk if you love Jesus” and “J.C. is the man.” Immediately I thought, Have they not heard of Dwayne Wade? How I made it through the week without defiling something with a 666 or inverted cross I’ll never know.
We parked in the lot of what seemed Glorieta’s central post. Possibly distinguishable as heathens to the lurking Baptists as vampires are to Blade, we exited our rental car, seeking cover in the reception center. There we were greeted by some version of an aunt, this reunion’s organizer, and picked up meal tickets, electronic room keys, a sheet of room assignments, and a Glorieta map that rivaled in detail and landmarks an expensive Atlas. “OK, just show me where I have to sleep and where I have to eat. Here, use this highlighter.”
Our room was nice enough with two double beds and a bathroom, comparable to any decent hotel. The wooden shelf built to hold a television held a leafy green plant instead, which we’d come to expect at family reunions. We had several plastic garbage cans, two Coke machines in the lobby, and ice machines at either end of the hall. Checking the room list, on one side of our room was an equipment closet, on the other side two high school age cousins. Waking up our neighbors late into the night wouldn’t be a concern this year.
With higher Glorieta powers demanding dinner be served from the ungodly hours of 4:30-6:30pm, my brother’s breakfast time on his recent night-shift work schedule, we hurried to grab a bite and see family already arrived. It’s always a bit intimidating walking into a room of 30-40 relatives, most of whom you haven’t seen in three years, and having to exchange smiles and brief introductions, pretending to have any clue who they are beyond physical recognition, and the newly married in or engaged don’t help. It’s all too brief, too much of an overload to process and store anything, especially when half the family has names that sound like prescription drugs, which might be a side-effect of having a flat-out fucking brilliant family; as my cousin Sam noted, “This family throws around Harvard waaaaaaay too casually.”
It’s not to say the pretend-you-know-who-I-am introductions are entirely aggravating. There were moments I’d anticipated for the last three years, meeting again with my favorite cousins and relatives; my Newburyport, MA relatives, first and foremost, as the kickass family I strive to keep touch with outside of reunions, including my unofficially adopted little sister, Giuliana, who exudes pure cool and fun, who can’t help but make me smile, and who it's no secret I adore unconditionally; and this particular reunion would yield a surplus of other cousins aged a few years into awesome.
The one comforting observation our carload made in our entrance, Glorieta had plenty of sprawling athletic facilities to entertain our sporting family. After the first of many straight-from-the-freezer cafeteria meals - served in camp style buffet lines like we should have expected, but shouldn't have had to deal with at an expensive family reunion - the younger crowd, participating adults included, headed toward the baseball diamond for a game of kickball. For my soccer playing foot-eye coordination and the ability to crush a rolling rubber kickball, plus being the athletic family giant, I ended up kicking cleanup – and any other time a homerun was necessary – for my team. Everyone seemed impressed that I could wallop a ball, and I wasn’t one to tell them they’d glimpsed my single talent besides producing believable fart noises with 12 different parts of my body.
Afterward, after showering and such, the younger generations gathered in the lounge area, crowding every available table in groups of four to six with two decks of cards, recreating the image of the week from every reunion in recent memory, reestablishing rivalries and reworking strategies in the greatest and most complicated of card games, canasta, a Pardee family addiction. The older generations, most of who were housed in a lodge on the other side of the Glorieta grounds, were unquestionably engaged in the same.
One of the few who hadn’t yet learned canasta, my Halo-addicted cousin, Adam, tried to plug his Xbox into the community TV, which, predictably, had humorous consequences. The dorm’s resident Baptist enforcer, a wrinkled old lady whose Jesus hadn’t endowed good looks, detected the violation with an uncanny sense. She flew from behind closed doors lecturing, “Didn’t you see the sign?” as she reached her entire arm into the enclosed shelf that kept the cable box under the TV. Pulling out a tiny, folded piece of paper that said something about, No external devices may be connected to the TV lest Jesus himself find his reentrance to the world through input or output channels blocked, her eyes Tsked Tsked. If I’d forgotten where I was, by my cousin’s half-cocked head and contorted face, and mostly the way he answered “No,” I’d have assumed he was being interrogated by someone a notebook page of hits into an acid trip.
Still, worried Jesus might smite me if he did indeed materialize from the darkness behind the cable box, I soon retired to my room with my brother and cousins. We proceeded to play cards and imbibe with abandon, my brother and I, days later the reunion's undefeated duo, completing the first of several miraculous-comeback games of Canasta, the four of us making up for the night prior by draining the handle of Beam and cracking the Smirnoff. Waking up the next day in time for an 11:30 lunch, our room was already looking like a typical college dorm. After voices had jolted Sam from sleep earlier in the morning, prompting him to jump from bed, shooing, and hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ hanger from the door handle, it didn’t matter. With carts in the hall and a storage closet next door, restocking no longer risked eviction.
But lunch still sucked and all the girls were underage and Baptist. To be continued...
On the way toward and into Santa Fe, I was reacquainted with the New Mexican countryside: sparsely vegetated plains stretching for miles with mammoth mountains jutting the horizon; curveless five-mile stretches of interstate, intermittently engulfed by hills and jagged cliffs exploding from nowhere to dwarf the highway. Everything was just as I’d imagined it would be in a desert land: 75 MPH speed limits, an abundance of dusty pickup trucks and dull-colored twenty-year-old campers with any number of chains hanging from them, adobe architecture, grizzled, mustached men with obligatory cowboy hats covering gray locks, tattooed women with hair either shaved or fashioned into dreadlocks, everyone in faded jeans regardless of gender, cacti and endless stretches of rock-protruded soil.
Santa Fe itself seemed anti-New Mexican, flashy and upscale, with lots of expensive shops and markets hawking artsy wares I’d have no interest in even if I were a millionaire (but the thousand-dollar-plus globes fashioned from multicolored glass were eye-catching). Santa Fe’s redeeming quality was the abundance of Mexican restaurants promising authenticity for proximity. After a mile-long search revealed the majority of AAA rated eateries were open only for dinner, a local who'd transformed her body into modern art with myriad tattoos and piercings pointed us toward a restaurant she assured was excellent, if I’m not mistaken taking advantage of the metal rod running through her nose to indicate direction.
Observing no other patrons when we arrived, we entered the noiseless building warily, only to be ushered back out by an accented voice, "No. No open 'till dinner." After a few minutes debate about whose Spanish was least deficient, Sam gathered the courage to seek a recommendation, to which the Mexican staff unanimously approved Tomasita's, gesturing back the way we'd walked, "No far. Block."
Tomasita’s was bustling, and the dining proved worthy of the 15-minute wait for our already famished family. Not only was our waitress a midget – pause, the dictionary informs that ‘person of restricted growth’ is the preferred term – Tomasita’s served truly authentic Mexican food, not the typical Tex-Mex fare that I love but can find back home. The sopapilla, especially smothered in honey and honey butter, was perfect, warm and fluffy and not too greasy. The selection of beers and tequila was encouraging given our travails the night prior, and the Sangria was sweet from fruits with an alcoholic bite. Among other dishes we sampled, I loved my open-faced enchiladas with tender, tasty grilled shrimp; my brother raved about the chiles rellenos; the tacos, served with freshly diced vegetables, a homemade shell, and succulent, presumably marinated, ground beef were – Yes, I’ll admit it – superior to Taco Bell’s in every single ingredient; and New Mexico’s famed green and red chiles lived up to their reputations for flavor and spice as everyone layered one or the other over their food. At the end of the meal I had the same diarrheic urge that Taco Bell inspires, but I was so supremely satisfied I wouldn’t have bemoaned an accident.
My cousins, my brother, and I split off from the adults to find a liquor store, agreeing we’d meet back up at the family reunion. After more than an hour searching, we happened past one as we drove out of town, the first we’d seen. With a limited selection of liquors and expensive prices, but knowing it would be hard to sneak cases of beer into the religious compound and not wanting to embarrass the entire family by being expelled, we settled on one half-gallon and two double-shot airplane bottles (so my brother could drink should we visit another bar) of Smirnoff, and one half-gallon of Jim Beam white label.
At ease for the first time since we’d entered New Mexico, we drove the twenty minutes to Glorieta. We followed directions to the welcome sign and beckoning white gates; passing through, we veered right. As our view opened up we were confronted with masses of teens running around, screaming, playing games and relay races modified with Southern Baptist bents, we were certain. I caught myself before I uttered the whole phrase, sounding instead what might have been mistaken for the uncertain introduction of a first timer's prayer. I doubted my hands were the only ones quivering as I thought about purchases we’d already stowed in our bags in the trunk.
The Baptist resort is enormous. The main road that loops around Glorieta is likely a mile in length, spotted with dorms, dining halls, a restaurant, a Christian store, and activity buildings, among others I never explored or noted, and there were more offshoot roads from the main drive than I cared to notice. According to the brochure, Glorieta is equipped to deal with 20,000 visitors and that didn't seem an exaggeration. There were literally thousands of summer campers milling around, all having arrived in one of the parked busses, cars, or vans with soap scribbled windows illustrating gigantic crosses and reading, “Honk if you love Jesus” and “J.C. is the man.” Immediately I thought, Have they not heard of Dwayne Wade? How I made it through the week without defiling something with a 666 or inverted cross I’ll never know.
We parked in the lot of what seemed Glorieta’s central post. Possibly distinguishable as heathens to the lurking Baptists as vampires are to Blade, we exited our rental car, seeking cover in the reception center. There we were greeted by some version of an aunt, this reunion’s organizer, and picked up meal tickets, electronic room keys, a sheet of room assignments, and a Glorieta map that rivaled in detail and landmarks an expensive Atlas. “OK, just show me where I have to sleep and where I have to eat. Here, use this highlighter.”
Our room was nice enough with two double beds and a bathroom, comparable to any decent hotel. The wooden shelf built to hold a television held a leafy green plant instead, which we’d come to expect at family reunions. We had several plastic garbage cans, two Coke machines in the lobby, and ice machines at either end of the hall. Checking the room list, on one side of our room was an equipment closet, on the other side two high school age cousins. Waking up our neighbors late into the night wouldn’t be a concern this year.
With higher Glorieta powers demanding dinner be served from the ungodly hours of 4:30-6:30pm, my brother’s breakfast time on his recent night-shift work schedule, we hurried to grab a bite and see family already arrived. It’s always a bit intimidating walking into a room of 30-40 relatives, most of whom you haven’t seen in three years, and having to exchange smiles and brief introductions, pretending to have any clue who they are beyond physical recognition, and the newly married in or engaged don’t help. It’s all too brief, too much of an overload to process and store anything, especially when half the family has names that sound like prescription drugs, which might be a side-effect of having a flat-out fucking brilliant family; as my cousin Sam noted, “This family throws around Harvard waaaaaaay too casually.”
It’s not to say the pretend-you-know-who-I-am introductions are entirely aggravating. There were moments I’d anticipated for the last three years, meeting again with my favorite cousins and relatives; my Newburyport, MA relatives, first and foremost, as the kickass family I strive to keep touch with outside of reunions, including my unofficially adopted little sister, Giuliana, who exudes pure cool and fun, who can’t help but make me smile, and who it's no secret I adore unconditionally; and this particular reunion would yield a surplus of other cousins aged a few years into awesome.
The one comforting observation our carload made in our entrance, Glorieta had plenty of sprawling athletic facilities to entertain our sporting family. After the first of many straight-from-the-freezer cafeteria meals - served in camp style buffet lines like we should have expected, but shouldn't have had to deal with at an expensive family reunion - the younger crowd, participating adults included, headed toward the baseball diamond for a game of kickball. For my soccer playing foot-eye coordination and the ability to crush a rolling rubber kickball, plus being the athletic family giant, I ended up kicking cleanup – and any other time a homerun was necessary – for my team. Everyone seemed impressed that I could wallop a ball, and I wasn’t one to tell them they’d glimpsed my single talent besides producing believable fart noises with 12 different parts of my body.
Afterward, after showering and such, the younger generations gathered in the lounge area, crowding every available table in groups of four to six with two decks of cards, recreating the image of the week from every reunion in recent memory, reestablishing rivalries and reworking strategies in the greatest and most complicated of card games, canasta, a Pardee family addiction. The older generations, most of who were housed in a lodge on the other side of the Glorieta grounds, were unquestionably engaged in the same.
One of the few who hadn’t yet learned canasta, my Halo-addicted cousin, Adam, tried to plug his Xbox into the community TV, which, predictably, had humorous consequences. The dorm’s resident Baptist enforcer, a wrinkled old lady whose Jesus hadn’t endowed good looks, detected the violation with an uncanny sense. She flew from behind closed doors lecturing, “Didn’t you see the sign?” as she reached her entire arm into the enclosed shelf that kept the cable box under the TV. Pulling out a tiny, folded piece of paper that said something about, No external devices may be connected to the TV lest Jesus himself find his reentrance to the world through input or output channels blocked, her eyes Tsked Tsked. If I’d forgotten where I was, by my cousin’s half-cocked head and contorted face, and mostly the way he answered “No,” I’d have assumed he was being interrogated by someone a notebook page of hits into an acid trip.
Still, worried Jesus might smite me if he did indeed materialize from the darkness behind the cable box, I soon retired to my room with my brother and cousins. We proceeded to play cards and imbibe with abandon, my brother and I, days later the reunion's undefeated duo, completing the first of several miraculous-comeback games of Canasta, the four of us making up for the night prior by draining the handle of Beam and cracking the Smirnoff. Waking up the next day in time for an 11:30 lunch, our room was already looking like a typical college dorm. After voices had jolted Sam from sleep earlier in the morning, prompting him to jump from bed, shooing, and hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ hanger from the door handle, it didn’t matter. With carts in the hall and a storage closet next door, restocking no longer risked eviction.
But lunch still sucked and all the girls were underage and Baptist. To be continued...
posted by Mr. Pibba at 4:46 PM
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