dallas loop

[mitcharody]

So a friend and I have a week, in late february, with which we plan to drive around TX, NM, AZ, etc. We're starting and ending in Dallas, from Sunday the 17th until Sunday the 24th. I'm from Seattle, she's from Milwaukee/Chicago, and neither one of us really knows much about the area, other than we want to see some awesome ghost towns, tourist traps, and UFO-related whatevers. I've found all kinds of good stuff online, what would you all recommend? We have a rental car and a shared dislike of rigorously scheduled vacations. Suggestions?

[Midwest Michael]

Welcome to the RTA forum!

I'm not an expert on this area, but I'm sure you'll be able to find tons of things that fall into what you are looking for. Here is a thread that has a ton of suggestions of things to check out in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

[PNW Judy]

If by "shared dislike of rigorously scheduled vacations" you mean that you like leisurely trips with a lot of time to relax and explore without feeling rushed, keep your miles down. I would say you might not want to drive more than 250-300 miles per day (which translates to about 4.5-5.5 hours per day on the road including time for quick stops for food/fuel/bio breaks). Maybe even less. So limit the miles of your trip to about 2000 total. Of course, use your judgment on this but if you try to start covering more miles, it might get too rigorous. ;)

Here's some fun ideas for Texas.

[mitcharody]

that beer can house on texastwisted.com is so, so cool. is it really closed to visitors? weak.

[mitcharody]

...can be found here: they are amazing.

[PNW Judy]

And good photos to prove it. It looks like you had a great time at White Sands. I bet it was great seeing the eclipse in that setting.

So, what were your favorite things? Any fun stories to share?

[mitcharody]

yes! definitely a few favorite spots/stories. i'll try to get to that this weekend.

[mitcharody]

It's tough to pick a favorite spot, here's basically what we saw:

day 1 -- dallas. the selling point of this trip was the relative total lack of planning, basically the idea was to get a week off with a rented car in the desert and just kinda go from there. so the first day, we met up in dallas and went to the library to get free internet to figure out what to do next. we found the library by asking this CRAZY looking guy in a coffee shop in some suburb, he was wearing a shirt that said "bare-knuckle boxing" and he only had a couple teeth left. after getting online, we scrapped the idea of going to austin first, and instead decided to just take back roads west across texas, to see some random small towns on the way to roswell. we got a cheap room at that awesome hotel in dallas with the huge spaceball thing and left in the morning.

day 2 -- texas is gigantic. the freeways are really boring, but the back roads are dope. we pretty much just went down random roads that looked like they would end up in cool places, and they always did. you find these little cemetaries that have been there since alamo days, for some reason we never really got tired of going to these. which evolved into sort of a broader theme of the whole trip, for me at least, which was the question of why these random places in the rural southwest are so interesting? and why do they put you in this strange, sort of quiet mood, where you drift off thinking about what you're looking at but later on can't really describe to anyone what you were thinking about for so long. maybe it's just a natural reaction to living in a noisy city for years and then suddenly dropping yourself into complete rural silence. your mind's not really used to wandering and so it kind of goes too far when you let it. i don't know. it was pretty awesome though.

day 3 -- roswell. SO cool. everything has aliens on it. down to the street lights. we took tons of pictures and went to the ufo museum for the real scoop. the ufo museum is heaven. it's this completely ridiculous ex-movie theater that comes off as a fifth-grade school project on ufo's, but always in this really endearing heartfelt way. you can pay a dollar and rent a walkman to guide you through the most confusing walking tour ever. the guy that works in the library will try to get you to watch ufo movies, he's super nice. bro down with him before you leave.

day 4 -- white sands and the space museum. possibly the highlight of the whole trip. i set up my hammock and sat in the middle of the white sandy part and it ruled. you can run and jump off of the cliffs of sand, which i really recommend you do. it takes weeks for all the sand to work its way out of every orifice in your body, but it's worth it. then we went to some christian thrift store and i bought a book called "clean living in a dirty world," that's all about why you should be scared of nikki sixx and how heavy metal dudes rape chicks on stage all the time and love the devil or whatever. a fantastic read. then we went to the space museum, because we saw an ad that said ham the space chimp was going to be there to watch the eclipse. after a couple movies in their dome-shaped movie theater, we learned that it was all a scam. ham died like 30 years ago and instead now we have a guy inside a chimp suit inside an astronaut suit who dances around in dome-shaped movie theaters. what a ripoff. we left. and saw the eclipse in the middle of nowhere, new mexico, and it was amazing. stars down to every horizon. another highlight.

day 5 -- later. i'm tired of typing.

[PNW Judy]

Love your report!

Did you go to the other UFO museum in Roswell where they have full-size dioramas of alien scenes that you can stand in and take pictures of yourself in. I wonder if it's still there? Eating in the restaurants is fun there, took, just to see all the creative ways they work alien and space words into the names of the dishes.

I know what you mean about your mind wandering. I get the same way when on the road (or hiking or walking the beach, etc.). I can spend hours just driving or walking and looking at things and not have a clue what I did, exactly, or what I thought about all day long. Sometimes I worry I had some wonderful ideas to create world peace, eliminate our need for oil, or cure cancer and was so zoned out that I forgot it. :)

I'm not sure what's making me chuckle more....the fake Ham or the idea of it taking weeks for you to get the sand out of....well, those private places. :)

I'm so glad you enjoyed your trip. (Oh, and you're not the only one who loves old pioneer-era cemetaries.)