Night in New Mexico, 1998

Here's a snippet from some notes I wrote during a trip from Dallas, Texas to Santa Rosa, California in December 1998. I'm only posting a snippet, for now, though later I may expand on this a bit.

We left Dallas around lunchtime. The odometer on the Toyota Previa van read 23,004. We stopped for an early lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Denton, Texas. After lunch, we left Denton, heading west. We took 380 to 287, then 287 northwest through Wichita Falls, Vernon, and the rest of the dozens of small towns on the route west to Interstate 40. Once on Interstate 40, we drove all the way to Tucumcari, New Mexico.

We arrived in Tucumcari at about 5:30 pm and found a room at the Safari Motel, on "Historic Route 66." It was still early, but we decided to have dinner at Dell's, a popular place, judging from the number of cars parked in its small lot and the crowd once we went inside. My wife had fried chicken livers (by far the best I have ever had…I don't even like them, but these were excellent). Dell's is a 50s style roadside café that seems to cater to the older crowd, but the clientele was mixed, ranging from an elderly couple sitting next to us (he asked if we had heard any news about what the House did on the impeachment votes against President Clinton…we hadn't heard what had occurred during the day because we weren't listening to the radio) to a group of three laborers behind them. One of the laborers, who looked very Mexican, asked for fresh jalapeños, which the waitress brought for him, and he ate them in an unusual way, at least in my experience: he first shook quite a lot of salt onto his plate, then rolled the whole peppers on the table with the ball of his hand, then bit off the tip of a pepper and put the moist end with the "wound" into the salt; he then bit off a large chunk of the salty jalapeño and chewed it up and swallowed it. I tried it a few minutes later, and found that the normally searing heat of the jalapeño was now very mild. I wonder, though, whether it was the pepper or the process…I'll have to try it again some day. Back at the motel, the road noise and train whistles (we were very close to the railroad tracks) made for a noisy night, but we got a fair amount of sleep anyway.

The next morning, we left Tucumcari, heading west. After driving about sixty miles, we stopped and had breakfast in Santa Rosa, NM, at a place called the Blue Moon Café. I asked for jalapeños to eat with breakfast, but the waitress , a Mexican woman in her mid-50s I'd guess, said they didn't have any; she said "jalapeños sound good, though, don't they?" and walked away, but came back a few moments later with some salsa that she said was homemade. It was tasty stuff, and she seemed genuinely pleased that I said I liked it. Her smile and her generous attempt to get something special that I would like got my day off to a great start.