From our “base camp” near Las Cruces, we stopped at the Jeep dealer for an oil change, then ventured south into Texas for a day’s visit, where a granddaughter is a supervisor at a home health agency and a son is manager of a seafood restaurant.
Our granddaughter took us through the “old town” neighborhoods to a local coffee shop–across the street from a Starbucks, so it was a different experience for us. Very nice place. As we left to meet with our son, the wind blew up a fierce dust storm, followed by rain, and soon the steep streets on the slopes of the Franklin Mountains turned into fast-flowing streams. But, the rain soon passed to the south into Mexico, and the wind subsided.
We brought along some belated house-warming gifts for the El Paso crowd. Our son is also an accomplished musician, audiophile, and cinemaphile, and one of our grandsons is also a musician, so we had decided to pass on my vinyl recording collection from my disk jockey days in the 1960s, along with the turntable, so they wouldn’t just be wall decor, but could actually be played. Our granddaughter got my mother’s cookbooks and some hand-painted dishes that Judy and I had picked up in Montana when we lived there.
It was a good visit: our son had recently moved to El Paso with his job promotion; even though our granddaughter passed his restaurant on her way to work every day, uncle and niece had not visited until now. As our family matures and disperses, we seem to be the catalyst for family gatherings. Unfortunately for us, the number of cities we need to visit to see everyone is increasing.
To celebrate our family gathering, we went to the Cattleman’s Steakhouse at Indian Cliffs Ranch near Fabens, a long drive out of the city, but an amazing complex, with a huge sprawling restaurant, a zoo, and an old (1979) movie set to tour. The others enjoyed the beef for which the very popular eatery is famous, while the vegetarian in our group (me) dined on “trimmings,” which consisted of a baked potato and a side of awesome mushrooms cooked in wine, plus dabs of ranch beans and coleslaw and a biscuit or two, as the rest of our party ignored the bread to concentrate on the baked potatoes and beef.
Hmm, I may lose weight yet, as we continue into the heart of beef, pork, and chicken country. In the west, most restaurants have at least one meatless entrée, but here the “empty plate” is meant for sharing the generously proportioned slabs of meat with a child or elder. Indeed, Judy carried away a fair portion of her once-a-year steak in a take-out box.
As the evening drew to a close, we headed back toward New Mexico, in more rain, as we passed through a small storm cell in the dark. But, fortunately, the heart of this storm was headed northward and would pass our destination before we arrived. We were treated to a spectacular desert lightning display straight ahead. We turned off the freeway and cautiously dodged pools and puddles on the farm roads to our lodging, where we found the driveway freshly gravelled and our casita dry, the latter having withstood the heavy but brief downpour without overt leaks. Leaky roofs are a constant plague in the desert, where flat roofs are standard construction.