Deming and Stuff and a Map

We owed these very interesting people a blog entry over a month ago.  I've told you before that Susan will talk to anyone, dead or alive. We were coming back from ArtUnraveled in Phoenix and stopped in Deming, New Mexico, to get gas and look for art stuff. At the gas station she started talking to these people and here is part of their story (as best as I can remember):

If you look closely you'll see that his motorcycle has an Alaska plate. He works on the North Slope for 6 months and then gets 6 months off. He does lots of road travel with his wife sitting right behind him. Road travel as in back and forth from Alaska to Florida and to California and back to Florida, driving right through the hotter-than-hell Southwest in August. On their helmets it says "If You're Not Living on the Edge You're Taking Up Too Much Room." They also live part of the time on a sailboat in the Caribbean.

Oh well. Just driving for 4 hours makes me tired and I'm doing it in an air-conditioned car!

When we were young, very young, and I was almost out of the Air Force (and had my Viet Nam tour over with) we had A Plan.  The day I became a cilivian we would fly to England, buy BMW motorcycles, and tour all over England and Scotland and Europe for 3 months. Then we would ship the motorcycles home and when we got back to Austin we could sell them to cover the costs of our travel. For some reason back then you couldn't get a certain type of motorcycle in the US so it was a big deal to bring them back. 

The Plan became more realistic, we loaded up backpacks, bought a Eurail pass, and flew Icelandic Air to Europe and backpacked through Europe for 30 days. Icelandic Air was nicknamed Hip-Hop Airlines because all the hippies (this was the early 70's) flew it, at that time; the rates were dirt-cheap because you had a stopover in Iceland and you landed in Luxembourg - a sort of odd route.  We slept in hostels and on trains, ate food from vending machines and street vendors and washed our socks in the sink every night. We had saved our money for a year, had no jobs, and no mortgage. And we were young enough to think that was the best time of our life.

Art stuff in Deming? Yes! We always stop at the Tinaja Alta Trading Company, a fancy name for an antique/collectibles store loaded with lots of odd, interesting, cool stuff.  Cindy and Miguel will cut a good deal for you as you pile up your stuff - old silverware, ledgers, buttons, etc. Everything you want and don't need but get anyway because you can never have enough art "stuff".