(Jefferson City)—Nancy and I have returned from our annual few-days visit to our snowbird friends who head to Arizona in October and don’t return to Missouri until April.  We were starkly reminded when we got out of our car at our house why they do that.

We drove in some pretty big cities—Oklahoma City, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, for example—but we were never so lost as when we turned off Highway 54 at the Lake of the Ozarks, thinking we were headed to a gas station. We went for some distance down a nice divided roadway and never passed a building, let alone a gas station, before we turned around and figured out how to get back on 54. We cannot be the only hopeless souls who cannot figure out that maze of exit and entrance ramps, traffic circles and winding roads that lack what is (to us, anyway) any reasonable signage that tells us what goes where. Tan-Tar-A is somewhere in that tangle. And the Four Seasons.  And the Mall. Yes, we’re glad we don’t have to drag through the Bagnell Dam Bypass, which in its day was a wonder, but getting off the bypass of the bypass is about as adventurous as Lewis and Clark setting out from Wood River Illinois, bound somewhere up a long and winding Missouri River.

(Las Cruces, NM)—Maybe the world would be better if all of us followed the lead of Deputy Sheriff Jamar Cotton.

At halftime of the New Mexico State University men’s basketball game on February 24, he hugged 112 people in sixty seconds, believed to be a new world hugging record, smashing Jason Ritter’s record of 86 set last October during a taping of “The View” television show in New York City. He could have hugged more if he could have moved, but the rules say he had to stay in one place and let the hugees come to him. He’s sending the paperwork to the Guinness Book people for proper certification. “This isn’t just about breaking a world record,” he told the Las Cruces Sun-News, “This is about something that we need in our community: Unity, love, compassion, caring about people, bringing people together.”

But there was a little drizzle on his parade.  Cotton’s hug record took up three columns above the fold of the newspaper on Monday after the event.  The fourth column was about the city police department paying a $1.4 million dollar settlement to a former Las Cruces couple who accused city officers of brutality and civil rights violations.

(Hereford, TX)—Out here in the Texas Panhandle, the land is flatter than a possum after ten days in the truck lane.  The trains seem to go on forever.   We saw four Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotives pulling a string of cars so long that it disappear into the vanishing point.  And it seemed only a minute after one train went past that another one rumbled by behind it.  Some have a couple of locomotives at the end as pushers.  We caught up with one westbound train that was probably going about 70 mph.  We were running about 80—you can do that out there; the flat distances entice you to do it—and it took us the better part of five minutes to go from the pushers at the end to the team of locomotives at the head of it all. Wish we could have counted the cars but we preferred staying in our lane. Some of the trains were hauling container cars—two stacked big boxes on flatcars that would somewhere be unloaded and mounted on the wheels of Lord Knows How Many Trucks and hauled away.

(Erick, Oklahoma)—There is some melancholy news to report for our generation from this little town of about eleven-hundred people a few miles east of the Texas-Oklahoma border (we are told it is just about halfway from Asheville, NC and Barstow, CA if that helps you locate it).  The Roger Miller Museum closed just before last Christmas.  Not enough people turned off of I-40 to go into downtown Erick, the town that Roger Miller called his hometown—although he was born in Texas.

The Museum had operated since 2004. The building is now the 100^th Meridian Museum, which marks the Texas-Oklahoma boundary. The line (of longitude, west of Greenwich) was identified by John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, as the line between the moist east and the arid west.

Erick was planning to continue the annual Do-Wacka-Do Trail Run if the public was interested. All of Roger Miller’s memorabilia was being returned to his widow, Mary.

Most of those who read these entries will remember Roger Miller and his wacky country songs of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly “King of the Road,” that reached number one on the country charts and number four on the pop charts. He died at the age of 56 in 1992, lung and throat cancer.

Before he left us, he created a Broadway musical in 1985 that was one of the few successful American Broadway musicals in an era when British productions were gaining popularity. “Big River,” based on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ran for a thousand performances in New York and won seven Tony Awards.  And those of us who enjoy the music of “Big River” are left to wonder what else he could have done as he moved farther away from the novelty songs that were so popular earlier in his career.

The 100^th Meridian Museum is open now on the corner of Old Highway 66 and Sheb Wooley Boulevard in downtown Erick.  (Sheb, another country singer from Erick, is remembered also as the first of the Frank Miller gang killed in the shootout with Hadleyville Marshall Will Kane in “High Noon.”)

(Itsnotsnow, NM)—The drifts were taller than our car and the road was covered.  But we didn’t slide and the weather was warm. And nothing was melting. Welcome to White Sands National Monument.

Fine gypsum sand stretches for miles, creating interesting light and shadows.  Bushes dot the landscape.  Desert animals survive in that environment somehow.   We didn’t see anyone doing it, but we were told that some folks go snowboarding or dog-sledding in the comfort of the desert warmth.   It’s a bit of an adjustment to be surrounded by so much whiteness but not be cold and wet.  Not a place to visit in the heat of summer, though, we were told.

(Peoria, Arizona)—The Kansas City Royals played the Seattle Mariners in their fifth exhibition game of the season on a mild and lovely Arizona day.  Royals won.  The same field is used by the San Diego Padres, who beat the Royals the next day.  Royals diehards know that former Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer now plays for the Padres.

In the teams store at the stadium, they sell baseballs.  If you want to spend some extra money, you can buy game-used balls with a tag attached that tells you who hit that ball and what the play was—foul ball, single, and so forth.  Most of the game-used balls went for forty bucks.   But there was one that was a foul ball struck by Hosmer in his first at-bat as a Padre.  The price tag on that one was $80.  Gotta sell a lot of foul balls to make back that $144 million the Padres are paying him.  Wonder what a fair ball would cost.

(Unidentified Flying New Mexico)—We found ourselves face to face with aliens one day.  The folks in Roswell, New Mexico do a pretty good job of trying to convince visitors that a spaceship with intergalactic aliens crashed near their town seventy-one years ago.

Roswell is bigger than we expected—almost forty-thousand people.  The museum appears to be in an old theatre and it has copies of newspaper accounts of something that somebody claims happened and accounts of the disappearance of all of the evidence, including the purported remains of the ship and its occupant(s), and government agencies and officials telling people who supposedly knew something they better not talk.  There are life-size figures in the museum of the purported aliens. Oddly enough, it seemed to us, there did not appear to be any female aliens.  Or male aliens. They were just aliens. There was no indication of reproductive apparatus or of different genders.  But, hey, these are serious aliens and they might be so advanced that such things are not necessary. If I see one for real, however, I’m not going to shake hands.

Did something really happen out there and at Area 51?   There’s only one person who has the authority to find out.   And with his abiding interest in getting to the bottom of all things aliens, we’re sure he’ll soon tweet a definitive answer to seven decades of questions.  He also might think about increasing the height of his wall.

(Albuquerque)—We filled up the car’s gas tank for $2.03 a gallon.  When we got home we filled it up for $2.29.  Just for the record.

(Toiletsnake, Arizona)—Just inside Arizona there was this rest stop.  Note the sign along the sidewalk suggesting people step carefully no matter how badly they need to go.

We don’t know why, but the sign left us wondering:

“In groups that practice snake-handling, if a young woman breaks her engagement can her former fiancé ask for his Diamondback?”

(Photo credits: Las Cruces Sun-News (Cotton) and Bob Priddy)