Monthly Archives: September 2024
el martinez service
I’ve been this place a lot of times but never even gave it a second glance. So maybe I missed seeing when it was open, seeing what the local customers were doing.
Or maybe, it’s been closed so long that if I had noticed it before now it would have looked approximately like this.
(Reason 1 to go back over and over to the same place.)
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 9.3.2024
fence decor
If you take the back roads, sometimes you’ll end up driving down into a valley with a tiny town at the bottom and that also feels like maybe you drove all the way into another place, another time. And maybe you’ll stop there for an hour or so. And maybe you’ll feel an overwhelming sadness as you leave, knowing you’re returning to the same place, the same time that you’d just left.
Villanueva, New Mexico
photographed 8.31.2024
frigid creme
We’d planned on having lunch in this little town in Kansas but were nearly through town before we saw anything that looked like lunch. Just as we were about to give up all hope we spotted a little hamburger stand called the Frigid Creme, right there on the corner of East Long Street and North Wichita Avenue. A smartly-executed high-speed turn and there we were – ready for an old-school burger!
The place is called the Frigid Creme, which is the model name of the particular burger-restaurant kit that the original owners purchased in the 1960s. I’d tell you more about that, but my Google search took me to a company that makes “premium embalming cosmetics” (also known as “mortuary makeup”) and now I’m traumatized.
Dighton, Kansas
photographed 9.5.2024
enforcement
We planned an entire trip (eight nights on the road) that was built around someone telling us that there was a great little restaurant in Burlington, Colorado. We’re up for a trip and thought we could drive up one day, eat dinner that night, and come home the next.
Only…then we added Oklahoma City because I had to be there anyway. Then we tacked on a few nights in Santa Fe for reasons that mostly dealt with another place to eat and added some other nights in places and before you knew it, we’d turned it into The Most Random Trip Ever (with food)™.
Really, why do anything the normal way when you can make it complicated?
Burlington, Colorado
photographed 9.4.2024
PS: Burlington has about 3,000 residents; one of them is the fancy chef over at the Dish Room who’ll make you a delicious dinner.
ring
The church in this tiny town was locked; that gave me time to explore the churchyard, where I found a ring with a heart-shaped stone hung over the statue’s thumb.
On a side note, sometimes I feel sorry for people who take the fastest route somewhere and who don’t deviate from the plan and who arrive somewhere in a “normal” amount of time: they miss stuff like this. I am speaking as a former take-the-quickest-route person who took great pride in beating my own records at getting where I was going, so I know for sure Previous Me wouldn’t have found this town, this church, or the ring.
San José, New Mexico
photographed 8.31.2024
One Day | One Image 