After leaving St. Louis, we took Rt 44, following a southwestern path across Missouri which paralleled old Route 66 in many places. "Historic Route 66" signs were everywhere, and the rest stops were frequently decorated with cool, vintage-style art and architecture.
Missouri was also where we would encounter two staples of our trip through the southwest-- lizards (live) and armadillos (all roadkill, sadly.)
We drove through heavy rain early on, but as the trees thinned approaching Oklahoma and the land dried up, so did the rain. Instead it became clear and blazingly hot, and the Ozarks gave way to a flatter, dusty terrain that looked like it was being baked. The skinks from earlier rest stops had been replaced with the largest spiny lizards I'd ever seen
They clustered under the rest stop timbers trying to beat the heat.
By the time we got to Oklahoma City, we were done. I honestly don't recall much about the city, because the parking lot was 109 degrees when we arrived and we just dragged our bags up to the hotel room and crashed. There are times you want to go out and explore, and times you want to call out for pizza, and this was one of the latter.
The land got rockier and drier the next day, until we reached what every film and TV show told me was 'The West.' By the time we started our final climb up Route 25, mountains-- not the tame green hills of the East, but big ass, unforgiving-looking peaks-- rose all around. It was spectacular.
Santa Fe itself was very odd. The city was beautiful and full of art and great food (much of which we consumed,) but downtown was basically a tourist playground. The only actual inhabitants we saw were Elderhippies; everyone else was just there for a good time. (Unless you were in the service industry, in which case you lived out of town anyway :() Most of the structures were faux-adobe, which was appropriate for jewelry stores, but kind of brain-freezing for vape shops. The overall impression was Authentic New Mexican Experience Disneyland, for grown-ups.
Downtown is pretty small, so we walked the whole thing several times over while waiting for our time slot at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum (which was fabulous and gave me a whole new view of the artist).
We toured the New Mexico Museum of Art and ate at a wonderful Oaxacan place where we got to sample six different kinds of mole (and they were all good.) All told we spent two nights there, and the only disappointment was our B&B, which had been raved to the skies but was under new management and still finding its feet. I also would have liked to have seen the Botanical Gardens, since Santa Fe's municipal plantings make extensive use of native plants, but there was, sadly, only so much time.
And then it was up at six am-- we were starting to get into the rhythm of fast travel by them-- and off to Tucson.
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