Category Archives: Adventure

(HT: Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid)

I’m still thinking about November as a month to remember the dead, and that reminded me that I wanted to post about a place that has a really fascinating cemetery.  Jumping from a Kansas City, Missouri Day of the Dead exhibit to a Madrid (pronounced “MAD-rid”) New Mexico cemetery is but the work of a second for my brain, so zip along with me, and I’ll show you the best cemetery I’ve ever seen in my life.
No, wait.
The problem I face with blogging is that I have so many places I’d like to show you, and  they all seem to need a bit of background information. Putting all this information plus the cemetery in one post seems excessive,  so today I will give you a general overview of the town, and save the cemetery pictures for next time.
In a nutshell, Madrid  is an old coal mining town…

The elevation of the town of Madrid is 6,020 ft. but if you want to see the cemetery, you’ll end up going quite a bit higher than that. If you navigate off of Hwy. 14 on to the “back road” through Madrid, and don’t mind some really rough spots on a gravel road that climbs the steep hill, you will be rewarded with a wonderful view of New Mexico sky and a cemetery you’ll never forget.

The south end has the miner’s graves and the north end has the cowboy/hippie graves. These first three photos are from the old section.

The cemetery is actually on private land, and in the video link you’ll get a glimpse of a huge white house in the background where the owner lives. But he’s not going to disturb this place or cause a problem for the people in Madrid who want to use it.

Here’s a brief overview of how things looked during the Halloween festivities that my kids orchestrated last night . I was working until late, so I didn’t get to see many  of the visitors, but everyone seemed impressed, and a few kids were genuinely terrified.

Gate at the entrance to the yard.

There were 17 torches lit, some red lamps on the ground, and some ultraviolet lights on the porch.

I wish I could have seen it all! There were 150 trick-or-treaters! Double the number from last year.

Some (real) animal skulls decorate the grill.

This one’s hard to see, but that’s “radioactive waste” spilling out.

Werewolf in the little tree. My son did some tree-trimming and used the branches as props and barriers behind the display, which worked well for keeping people in the right area of the yard.

Orange kitty ignored the spider and ghost.

Heat lamps feel…

Happy Halloween to everyone!

I got pretty burned out on Halloween when I was raising my kids. Five costumes and five pumpkins and trick-or-treating will do that. We didn’t usually decorate the yard much, although I do remember using some flower bed dirt to make a grave mound one year.  But the dirt was already there because I was planting a whole new bed, it’s not like I dug it up for that purpose. Personally, I can take it or leave it. When I’m not at work that evening, I spend time over with my kids, who do things up right, starting several months in advance. Given my lack of enthusiasm,  I’m a bit mystified about how involved my now-grown kids are. My boys especially really go for the creepy stuff.

Only some of the props were up when I took these pictures yesterday. Imagine flaming torches alongside the sidewalk…

A few generations ago this parking lot was full of people journeying along Route 66.  People stopped here because their engines were overheating, or the kids needed to stretch their legs, or they just wanted to pause for a view of how the water divided.

The view wasn’t all that much, but a dad could walk down below with the kids, step behind a phony hogan, and tell they chillerns if they pee here their water would go both ways, ending up in two different oceans.

The hogan was a lot more inviting back then.

It hadn’t played hotel to a thousand stranded hitch-hikers and drunks looking for a roof.

The roof, of course, still held out the rain and snow.

It hadn’t entered the phase before even the drunks avoided it.

Though all the seeds were planted.  All they needed was nurturing a generation or two.

Garden Deluxe comes…