A Royal Road

The drive south from Albuquerque to El Paso in Texas was a good opportunity to make use of the overdrive facility on US cars. Once onto I-25 it was nearly 220 miles without a turn at a maximum speed most of the way of 75 mph until we reached Las Cruces and then took I-10 into El Paso. As the male Superpharmette said when we spoke to him as we drove the highway, we had better make sure at about 200 miles that we didn't miss the turning. As we discussed the day's news and the differing foci of UK and US news broadcasts he said that the Hamas take over of Gaza when balanced against the Fatah campaign to hold onto the West Bank appeared to fulfil the Palestinian wish for a two state solution.
The drive southwards was broken by brown signs pointing points of interest along the way. Camping sites and historical markers, we decided to follow one sign that pointed to something called the Camino Real International Heritage Center. Taking a turning off I-25 and then following a paved road for about 3 or 4 miles into the wastelands to the east of the highway brought us to one of the nicest museums we had come across so far. In an almost endless vista of scrubland with mountains on the horizon was what looked like a small and uninteresting building. Inside, however, was completely different. A brand new, air conditioned building, opened only about 8 months ago and built on the side of a hill, it told the story of the Camino Real - the road that linked Santa Fe in the north with Mexico City in the south and then by other caminos to Spain - during the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries. A series of fascinating displays and exhibits explained the importance of the road and the campaigns of conversions of the indigenous Indian populations by Franciscan monks who led the earliest expeditions into what is now New Mexico. Interestingly, the list of names of the first expedition from present day Mexico up to Santa Fe included a group of people with the name Perez which, though not exclusively so, could be the names of 'conversos' who had made their way to the Americas after the Expulsion of 1492. The history of the road up to the 20th Century is documented together with the introduction by the Spanish of horses into the Americas and the massive change that these animals made to the Indian tribes of the area such as the Utes and particularly the Comanches who moved south from the plains and who dominated the area for nearly 200 years afterwards. The Mescalero Apaches who marauded through the south of New Mexico also made good use of horses as well as as taking mescaline from desert plants hence their name of Mescalero. After the Civil War, and after a 36 day rule of the area by Confederate forces, the US Government established a series of forts in the territory manned mostly by regiments of black soldiers. The Apaches and Comanches were so fascinated by the curly black hair of the African American soldiers that they compared the hair to the fur on the hides of the buffalo that they hunted and that is why they called these black skinned soldiers the 'Buffalo Soldiers' which was a factoid that we didn't know until then.
Once we had finished looking at the exhibits in the exhibition we decided to eat our lunch in a shaded corner of a small picnic area just outside the Center's gift shop. This shop was staffed by a very nice lady who seemed to have a none too strenuous job of sitting in the shop, reading a book, listening to Verdi opera on a small stereo system and talking to visitors such as ourselves. Come 2.00pm, she closed up the shop, went out into a small parking lot, got into her 4-matic Mercedes Benz 430 and drove off home across the line of the original Camino Real.