Writing from a motel room in Taos, where we have showered, paddled around happily in a very warm indoor pool, relaxed in the spa, eaten a delicious Wendy's hamburger (MEAT!  well, I did; he didn't, but managed with a baked potato, as everything else in town was closed.)  A motel, you say?  STFU; we had our reasons.  Air. Air was the reason. Air does not seem to be our friend, this trip - it tried flipping us into the sky, knocking us over, and when all that didn't work, it tried smoking us out.

92,000 acres have burned in New Mexico, containment is at 3%, and the last part of the drive here was obscured by smoke, enough that it was difficult to breathe.  We did check into an RV park, but after some consideration, it got obvious it was an indoor air-conditioned evening.  If we planned to breathe.  We don't plan much, but that one is kind of a no-brainer.

Hotel signs offer discounts for firefighters and evacuees. Carson National Forest is closed. We won't try driving through any more of this ^!@#^.  Good thoughts for those who have lost homes & property.  We'll re-route.

Another unfair strike by air is that Dapple is struggling along and must go in tomorrow for some R&R of its own - possible issues with vacuum, M says, which I darkly think is just another air trick.  Perhaps air feels rejected when you choose ground travel, I don't know.

We shall see. In the meantime, there's Taos, which we will make the most of tomorrow. I think we can both use a non-driving day. Or all three of us, counting Dapple the Brave. 

But today - before we hit the smoke wall - we visited an outrageous place coming into Taos, the Earthship, a completely noodle-appendaged off-grid community, or religion, or whatever you choose to call it; beautifully built of bottles and cans and tires and straw and using solar energy only, recycling all its water for maxiumum use, insulating with earth, all amazing and available to each and every one of us if you have deep pockets, which they cheerfully admit.  Still, the architecture is beautiful and whimsical, and, as M knew, appealed to me very much.

The entry to Taos is dotted with dwellings - they are not houses by any conventional standard - built on buses and campers which have evolved with clay and corrugated tin and cement and creativity into spaceships of their own, and they are fascinating - but they are also private, and too far from the road to photograph well. But the Earthship photos represent much of what we saw.  I want to build a place like that, perhaps as the final resting place of Dapple the Brave, but I want to build it in Bolinas*, and I think land is not so cheap there. ;)

We also stopped and wandered through the CumbresToltec Narrow Gauge railroad, a transit buff's playground, and sort of followed the rail line up through the San Juan Mountains.

So. A full day. And a spa evening. And tomorrow will tell us more about the future plans of the All Who Wander Tour.  But I know I will get another hot shower, and there are no tornados in this motel room. Bliss!

* I am afraid they might have air in Bolinas, though.

Tree, uprooted by that windstorm in Zed & Jed's RV park last night.
And you thought I was exaggerating.

The Indecisive Apache Chinese Restaurant where we lunched.

Earthship!

Railyard. I love rust.