I am not a big student of the Lincoln County War, but Kathy is and so is my co-author Joyce. (Last time Joyce was in Indianapolis she made a point of driving by the address at which the Kid's mother lived before homesteading out. It's now a parking lot.)

You come into Lincoln gradually. At some point when heading east on 380 you pass a sign telling you you're entering Lincoln. The road winds along the river valley and you see occasional houses of modern clapboard or crumbling old adobe, then you come on the sign that tells you you're in the Lincoln Historical District. The entire town is one house deep on either side of the road. The hills are too steep to build on, so everything's on the only flat space available.

We hit Lincoln on the off season (which was a relief after paying on-season prices in Arizona), except for the ski resorts we weren't interested in. Everything except the old Lincoln county courthouse and a couple of other buildings included in the admission fee was closed. At one point I had to be gently led away from a small locked and barred weaving shop as I tended to stand outside the door and wail, "It's got YARN in it," if left unattended.

We parked in the lot next to the permanent site for the stage for the annual Billy the Kid Pageant, which is also next to the old Lincoln County Courthouse, which is also, for those of you who are keeping track, the Murphy-Dolan store. It's now a museum. Not, I'm afraid, a very well kept up museum considering the hold the legend of Billy the Kid has on the American imagination. The rooms are dusty and smell neglected, like an old house that hasn't been opened in a long time, and the exhibits are sparse. I recall spurs that were given to the Kid, a few "typical" examples of this and that from the period, and a five foot tall sepia-toned blow-up of the only known photo of the Kid.

There are markers and signs describing the places and events surrounding the Kid's escape from the jail upstairs, and, oh yes, a carefully reproduced Masonic Lodge in the room where one had been when the building was a store.

Point of information on that photo of the Kid: in most reproductions it has been flipped in the lantern, which has led to the myth of the "left- handed gun". If you look at the reproductions where the Kid's pistol is in reach of his left hand you'll see the Kid's vest buttons are also on the wrong side. This was borne out by a very crisp clear reproduction of the original in a display case--it was the right way round. I double checked this with the Rangers at the museum desk, and they are well aware of the fact. The original tintype is gone BTW--it was exposed to sunlight for too long.

As we wandered down the road reading the notes on the map from the museum and taking note of the buildings I was struck by one thing, when I could drag my mind away from schemes to pick the lock of the weaving shop. I tried to imagine a five day gun battle in that narrow little town and the idea was very sobering. The only cover was from the buildings and trees around them. To leave the house to go to the privy, to get water meant being in the range of someone who might shoot you. It must have been a terrifying experience for everyone in that town, whether involved in the actual fighting or not.

The post office was open, so Kathy and I bought postcards. I mailed one to Joyce, and Kathy mailed one to herself and we saw them canceled with the official Billy the Kid stamp. The post office is a tiny little hole in the wall, with a window and a bunch of metal fronted boxes. Oddly enough the memories it invoked were not of old western movies but the PO in Buffalo, Indiana, the town I lived in when I was eight. My uncle was the Postmaster and one of my chores was to run down there every day to get the mail. The Buffalo PO was smaller, but it was the same kind of place.

Since we didn't see any open stores in Lincoln we did a junk food stop in Hondo. Heretofore I had never believed in the existence of a place called Hondo. But it has a gas station and the Southwestern equivalent of a "Bigfoot" convenience store, so it must be real. (I think this was the chain that had the burritos Marty remembered so fondly. Wherever it was Marty decided, having lived on these things for several years in his younger days, that he was going to have one for old times sake. The memory lingered with him for several days, only fading occasionally when we gave him more extra strength antacids.)

Roswell was our next stop. As you may recall Dan had scored a copy of New Mexico Magazine at the hotel and had read about the Alien Zone in Roswell. It proved surprisingly easy to find, being downtown on the main street. AZ occupies two store fronts. One is a gift shop, specializing in t-shirts with aliens. The back is an ice cream parlor, decorated in the prevailing theme--i.e. aliens. Also hanging around the shop are rubber aliens designed by the people who do the aliens for the X-files. You are invited to take pictures with the three rubber aliens. We have a series of photographs of all of us holding up the aliens. (A rubber alien body is NOT designed to sit in a chair without very careful balancing, and then there are those huge heads to hold up.)

We took a break for lunch at the Denny's down the street. It wasn't the best food on the tour. In fact the extra-strength antacids were in popular demand the rest of the afternoon.

Then it was back to the Alien Zone for the second part of the tour--Area 51. For $3 each you pass through a door cut into the wall between the two storefronts and find yourself in a series of little vignettes with, surprise!, aliens. You are welcome to interact with more rubber aliens and take pictures. Consequently we have the following to pass on to our descendants (besides the ice cream parlor pictures, of course): Dan popping out of a UFO, Linda doing an alien autopsy with a cleaver, Chelsea popping out of a UFO, Kathy writing on a blackboard in a school room with resident alien, Chelsea on the back of a motorcycle with an alien, no one in a scene with a toxic waste dump labeled Area 51 which didn't have aliens only large rubber spiders, Dan in a bar with aliens, Kathy waiting for a phone while an alien talked, and of course Marty reading a newspaper in an outhouse next to an alien in a cowboy hat. (The alien--not Marty. Marty would look silly in a cowboy hat.)

We only shot off about half a roll of film. According to the article in New Mexico most people shoot five or six (rolls not rubber aliens, which is too bad because I wanted to shoot a rubber alien by then.)

Outside the theme continues. Two doors down from the Alien Zone is the UFO Research Center which sells more alien stuff and monographs on aliens. Across the street is what would be a perfectly normal little craft shop, but this one has a fiberglass UFO imbedded in the facade. (Inside it has Alien keychains, postcards and overpriced embroidery floss.) Down the street from the AZ is what was once a gift shop, devoted to overpriced Southwestern Tourist Junk, and overpriced Native American Tourist Junk. Now it's devoted to overpriced Southwestern Tourist Junk, overpriced Native American Tourist Junk and overpriced ALIEN junk.

Two doors down from that is what was once a movie theater and is now The UFO Museum, apparently owned and operated by descendants of relatives of people who talked to someone who claimed to have seen the Roswell crash site. (One of them. I'm told three locations claim the honor. All are tourist traps now. I think the real one is in New Jersey.) The Museum is free. You can take pictures, though the lighting level doesn't make that easy. There's a diorama showing the crash, displays discussing various theories about what really happened. (Including an almost reasonable presentation of the evidence for the object having been one of the Project Mogul weather balloons.) The best part is the display of cartoons; my favorite is of Marvin the Martian and his dog scowling at a couple of grey aliens and saying "Amateurs".

Did I mention the Alien slushy stand and the little alien on top of the sign at the parking lot? I have come to the conclusion that if I lived in Roswell I'd move the hell to Hondo, even if it doesn't exist.

We made it to Carlsbad that evening. The hotel we stopped at was brand new. We could almost smell the paint. It also had a pool and hot tub, where we all decided to soak in hot water and not think about aliens.

The hotel was also obviously owner operated. We could see the living room of a private apartment overlooking the lobby. I hope they were watching when I went to get out of the hot tub, because they could get sued if it happened again. The top step of the tub was about a yard high. When you get out your choices are smooth and slippery concrete or a very painful-to-walk on grass matting. As I tried to crawl of the tub I tried to position my foot on the concrete to avoid the mat. My foot slipped and I tumbled backwards into the tub, narrowly missing hitting my head on the rail. I only got a mildly scraped knee and shin, but it was pretty scary at the time.

First thing that morning I checked our credit cards and found to our great relief that the payments Dan had made just before we left had gone through. This left us enough credit so that Dan could call the car rental agency and get the rental extended until opening on Monday. In spite of the fact that they'd told us that it had to be in for someone who'd reserved it for Saturday morning--of course the fact that this was Thursday and the odds of us getting the minivan back in 48 hours or less were small--there was no problem with this at all.

Kathy and Marty had been to Carlsbad several times before, and really wanted Chelsea to get a chance to see it, since she had been too young to go before they left Texas.

The visitor's center I remember as a big airy area, with the usual gift shop, bookstore, displays, and the ticket booth. We bought general admission tickets, which would have admitted us to both the Big Room and the King's Palace tours. We'd just missed the bus for the latter, so we got on the elevator and headed down for the self-guided Big Room tour. I was pretty exhausted and I wish I could give you a detailed description of what we saw. What I recall of the tour is a sort of surreal mixture of vistas, the voice from the tour CD (about which more anon) and a dogged determination to get from bench to bench along the trail as quickly as I could to sit down. Toward the end I felt like a zombie trudging mindlessly toward the exit. A few things stand out--Rock of Ages, Fairy Land, the Temple of the Sun. They were lovely and silent and awe-inspiring and I wanted to get out of there and go home.

We'd rented the cd players with headsets for the tour. The theory was that at certain places the CD would be triggered and explain what you were looking at. The reality was that some times they'd trigger at the right spot, sometimes they wouldn't trigger at all, sometimes you'd get a very low volume preview of the next track, and sometimes they'd play the wrong track entirely. It was entertaining to watch the faces of the people around you as they heard the tell-tale hiss, beep as the CD player started up.

Some weeks after we got home I made an odd little discovery. At the gift shop downstairs--the one that's actually in the cavern--we bought one of those little folding strips of photos of various important features of the caverns. In my mother's postcard collection I found exactly the same little strip of pictures. I remembered that she and my stepfather had gone to Carlsbad early in their marriage. It was a pleasant feeling to have shared something lovely with her across 30 years.

Upstairs we checked the departure time for the next King's Palace bus and discovered we had a couple of hours to wait, since the self-guided Big Room Tour had taken much longer than the usual estimate so the one had just left. We decided to skip it and hit the road for home.

By this time I was tired, cranky, knew my blood sugar was dropping and was beginning to wish I'd never agreed to the trip, but my travelling companions turned that around. Right by the entrance to Carlsbad is yet another tourist shop called, I think, White City, where we stopped. As I wandered through the gift shop trying to decide whether to blow my last few bucks or not, Kathy turned up suddenly, looked at me, and told Dan, "I'm going to feed Linda." Then she bundled me off to the grocery store and got me some variety of food and drink (no tamales). The guys and Chelsea turned up a minute later and right after that we got into the car. While we were driving out, Kathy turned around and handed me a sack from the tourist place. Inside was a brown Carlsbad t-shirt with a saguaro on it. Then I noticed that there was another sack tucked next to my seat. Dan handed it to me--it was a turquoise t-shirt with four kokopellis dancing around it. (I'd been hoping to find a kokopelli something all that trip, but I never saw the right one, though the neon colored kokopelli keychains at the gas station in Hondo had been tempting.) It was very sweet of them, and I'm glad I didn't go into a coma and miss it.

We headed out of New Mexico, got the route slightly muddled and crossed the border near Plains, TX. This is where Chelsea got a valuable lesson--go to the potty when you have the chance because it's a loooong way between towns. We finally pulled into a McD's in Someplace West Texas in the nick of time. The plumbing lacked notable novelties, but all over the rest of the restaurant were prints with groups of celebrities, all of which included Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. (For instance one showed Elvis sitting at bar with Marilyn, another showed Elvis watching Marilyn's skirts blow up in the scene from Seven Year Itch, yet another was a nightclub scene with about 10 or 15 movie stars sitting around, including Elvis and Marilyn.) They were very slick air-brush pieces and I keep wondering if they were prints or done by a local artist.

Other than that the drive was flat, more flat, ostriches, oil wells, a herd of very confused looking llamas, cows, natural gas wells and flat. Patches of alkali were pointed out--I confess I'd of mistaken them for snow myself. After a while it all looked a lot like the rest of it.

We made Lubbock by dinner time, and at Chelsea's insistence we saw the two different hospitals where her brothers and sister had been born. (Chelsea was born in Odessa.) For dinner we stopped at one of their favorite places, a Chinese restaurant with Mongolian barbeque. (Well, the terrain was right.) We discussed trying to convince somebody that Bloomington needs a Mongolian barbeque. If we can have three (3) Tibetan places we could probably support one Mongolian place. Then we found a hotel and crashed out.

The next day we hit I-40 and eventually crossed into Oklahoma where the ground got wrinkled again. At the toll booth we asked if the escaped mental patients had been caught and the attendant had no idea what we were talking about. We hit the World's Largest McDonald's while the McGift Shop was open and bought Mcpostcards. We spent the night in Joplin (which was where we'd intended to spend the first night out.)

One more tourist placed loomed on the horizon. For Kathy we made a stop at the Walnut Bowl Outlet, where she found her teriyaki bowls. I found grandfather clocks on sale and refrained from buying one because we didn't have the money, a place to put it, or room in the van.

We pulled into Bloomington about 9PM. Kathy's oldest son Nick who had been house sitting for us along with his younger brother Chris, had been warned to pick his sister Kara up from the friends she'd been staying with, so all the kids were waiting for us. Our cats, however, were in hiding. I had to get Merline out of the covered cat box where she'd spent most of the time we were gone. (And did she smell good, uh-huh.) Flirt had been let into Dan's radio room and had had to be drug out by force, a lot of force judging from the stuff that was dumped on the floor and the torn curtain. When the boys got Flirt out they let Dingy in and she'd been trapped in there for a day. Lucky turned out to be in the basement--we don't know how long or why.

Kathy and Marty took the kids and the van. We got most of our stuff and I made a late dinner, we went to bed and Dan was back at work by 8:30 AM.

The minivan rental wound up costing a lot more than we expected since they'd neglected to tell us how expensive the insurance was, and also because of the cleaning charges for getting all that Souveneir Estrella Grass out of it. In the intervening years we've recovered and we both really want to go back. Next time, however we're going to fly even if I have to spend the whole flight pulling up on the seat arms to keep the plane from falling out of the sky.

And we did have fun. However, I have one final general observation--the merest suggestion: I think the Southwest would benefit from one of our little Midwestern customs--we put water in our rivers!