Live and Learn New Mexico!

"Country roads... take me home"...an old John Denver song we love because it evokes a kinder, gentler time of life and going back to our childhood.  I think that people react the same way to my photos of remote and abandoned places in New Mexico. There's a nostalgia at play. We wonder who lived there and why did they leave?  Most of our enchanting state even today is rural. Many of us are lucky to live off country roads... peaceful mornings...clear clean air...birds... There's also a romance to the country road. I like to imagine walking down each to a warm, friendly home at the end, accompanied by my dogs. Like a true New Mexican, I love to explore all our state has to offer, traveling the side roads and country lanes, blasting the music. New Mexico country roads...aaah! the stories. Until next time, peace. 

My son Daniel has been helping a friend clean up his property and I've gone along to help watch my grandson Oliver (shown hooking up a car to tow) or just to get out and about.  This friend is what I will call the typical New Mexico car "collector" -- hard working, dedicated individuals who start out buying one of a favorite kind of car to fix up and end up with their rural properties littered with more fixer uppers of the same make/model usually.  In the case of my son's friend, it is BMW for the most part, with a Porsche or two scattered around. His cars are shown in this post.  Snapping pictures as I hung out, I thought of Dad, another car collector. When I was a kid, he was into Alfa Romeo.        We lived in neighborhoods that didn't have room for car collections but I remember a little old Spider sports car in the rocks at the side of our driveway. I don't think Dad ever got it running. But he had it forever. O

I couldn't wait to write about the old billboards dotting our interstate highways but once I sat down to do it, I wasn't sure what to say.                                              So I did what I always do when I'm unsure... I started researching their history.            I am a nostalgic soul. I love to think about traveling the interstate highway system when it was innovative and new, reading the billboard ads for upcoming rest stops and travel centers...Dairy Queens.  Turns out billboards were conceived long before the automobile and highways came along, around 1830 in fact. They were basically large posters hung outside businesses to attract passers by. Barnum and Bailey's circus was advertised on early billboards.  Other early billboards enticed travelers to stay in local hotels, eat in local restaurants, shop local stores.  Then came the automobile and the billboard business took off, even more so with the advent