I hadn’t planned on visiting Roswell, it seemed too much “on the beaten path,” and I thought I had already been there. I ended up there because any other direction was going to require a much longer drive than my “target” of a maximum of 180 miles a day or they were too close, and it looked like my choices would all end up in yet another soon-to-be ghost town. I was getting a bit tired of dusty, depressing towns without places to eat. It turned out that I hadn’t been there, instead I had visited a tiny town near the gate to Area 51 – I had mistaken it for being Roswell, which is actually about 30 miles from that fat spot on the road. The place I had visited consisted of a bar/restaurant where pilots and scientists working at Area 51 relax at the end of the day.

Roswell is a large, vibrant (in comparison to my previous few day’s experiences) community of perhaps 60,000 folks. On the morning of this leg of my trip I made reservations in yet another Best Western on Main Street in Roswell. I have been finding that Best Westerns are often my choice because they are toward the lower priced places that I can depend upon being at least “ok.” They usually (perhaps always) offer a complementary breakfast of yucky scrambled eggs, greasy bacon and/or sausage, bland fried potatoes, coffee, cheap rolls, juice and a couple of type of fruit. Not very good, but plentiful and free. Breakfast is to be found in a sterile little room with a few other silent travelers. I find the whole breakfast event to be rather depressing – but often it is the only choice in town, and it saves me $20 or so for the breakfast that I would really like. It is much better than my breakfast at home where I usually have a bowl of granola and a cup of instant coffee – so I am not complaining. It turns out that I often don’t get around to eating the BW breakfast until late in the morning, meaning I can skip lunch and have an early dinner – another $20 saved. This results in the room only costing something like $50 when savings on meals are factored in.

I have acquired a “normal” pattern when I roll into a new town. My first task is to find my motel. (I am now finding it best to make reservations in the morning before I set out on my adventure. This gives me a chance to search the options on Expedia or similar web site, and then call the property directly to make sure of availability of a room and quiz them about the availability of restaurants.) After locating my lodging for the night, I take a driving tour around town in an attempt to find the “town” (if there is any), locate places to eat and/or drink, and just get the lay of the land. I did that in Roswell and found that while it is a large town, there really isn’t much of a “town” there. It is mostly residential areas and a cluster of mall type businesses and hotels on Main Street shared by the main highway.

There is a small “historical district” that clearly used to be the “town.” It has old, now converted, movie theaters, restaurants, banks and other businesses. Now they are almost all stores catering to the “alien tourist” trade. The historical district consists mostly of stores selling alien trinkets, the international alien museum, rock shops, sellers of incense and “hippy” clothes, art consignment stores, and an eclectic store full of “antiques” (old junk) – odd places that might lure in those that like to fantasize about aliens and such. I read that the alien tourist trade brings in about $16 million a year to the town, so all of these weird little businesses are tolerated by the city. Statues, images and illusions to aliens are everywhere in town.

I ended up leaving a bit of money in that district as there were a few things that just couldn’t be passed up.

I went into a UFO store and found a large selection of books on the topic, one of which I already owned and found pretty thought provoking. I asked the sales clerk which one he thought had the most “truthful” story. He handed me the The Ultimate Guide to the Roswell UFO Crash. After asking for his assistance I felt sort of obligated to purchase it for $22.44. Is there a hidden meaning in such an odd price? It consists of brief discussions of things that transpired during the weeks of June 1947, along with GPS coordinates and QR codes for the locations where these events took place. They are interesting little stories.

I stepped into an art consignment store were a dozen or so local artists display their wares. I was very impressed with many of the paintings. They seemed quite good to me – but out of my price range and besides I don’t want to start cluttering my already filled car with more stuff. However, I did get to talking with one of the artists who managed to get me to admit that I am wandering the country and hopefully trying my hand at drawing simple illustrations as a total amateur. She showed me a kids book that she had illustrated, suggesting that her very simple sketches (as if done by an 11 year old boy) might give me some inspiration. I purchased the book.

Soon after buying that book I wandered into a store selling rocks, crystals and things like that. I noticed a large pile of geodes selling for between $10 to $35 each, depending upon weight. That got me into telling the clerk about my experience in the southeast corner of the Mojave Desert where I came upon a large area filled with geodes that one of the members of our group of friends returned to after the trip and took all of geodes for himself. He didn’t leave any behind for anyone else to appreciate, and didn’t offer any of them to those on the trip that showed him where they were located. Just goes to show, if something is important to you be very careful about letting others have access to it – they just might end up taking it for themselves. That story led me to continuing on and telling him the story of my father and my encounter of the third kind with aliens in that part of the desert. The clerk seemed pleased with the story and said that something must be happening with the alignment of the moon because I wasn’t the first person to wander in with personal stories of encounters with aliens.

While wandering down the street looking into store windows I was stopped by guy about my age. He wanted to talk about his trip driving around the USA taking his time and just looking at things. We shared stories of our experiences for a few minutes while standing on the sidewalk. This was perhaps the fourth or fifth time in the last two weeks that someone wanted to tell me that they are doing the exact same thing as I am. The country must be swarming with old hippies (or those who wanted to be hippies) drifting around taking it all in, trying to learn to stop and smell the roses. They are dropping dollops of money in lots of little back country, out of the way, places. It seems like a good thing, one that many people are compelled to do when their life changes by things like retirement or the loss of a partner.

I didn’t want to eat lunch at any of the fast food places on main street, and was unable to find anything in the historical district, so I headed out to where the old silos and abandoned wool mills were located on the “other” side of the tracks. I found a cafe directly across the street from the farm supply store called Cowboy Cafe with giant pickups in the parking lot. That seemed right up my alley as a likely place for encountering the local folks. As usual, all heads turned toward me when I walked in, but once they decided I was harmless they went back to the discussions and meals. It was a nice hometown cafe, full of people that obviously work with their hands in the outdoors. I ordered a pork chop and fixin’s. The windows had amazing temporary art painted on the glass. I think it is temporary because the paintings were actually on the outside of the windows, exposed to the weather – but the view was from the inside. They all showed scenes of the surrounding desert during dusk, with dark storm clouds in the background and cowboys doing various things, one was squatting by a fire cooking his dinner, another was sitting on a horse, things like that. The amazing part was how the light from outside lit up the scenes to create just the right mood. They were crudely done, perhaps with a sponge – ragged and unfinished around the edges, but I found them to capture the solitude and beauty of the desert.

About the time that I was finishing up my meal a tall, “macho” cowboy came in. He was wearing his big cowboy hat, giant belt buckle on his levi’s, and had a bit of a swagger. He sat down in a booth where he could see me and expressed deep, visceral hate. If looks could kill, that was what he would have done. The feeling of anger and hate just wrapped him in a cloud of nasty. It was a brief glance, and he quickly looked back to the others at the table, but it is very clear and obvious. Instead of being frightened, my reaction surprised me to be more along the lines of compassion – how very sad to spend your life living full of hate and anger. That must feel terrible. I soon got up and left without incident, but my sorrow for folks that live in such pain stayed for the rest of the day. I think there is a lot of that out here in the land of the deeply religious, deeply conservative countryside.