Captain’s Log – Helen Mirren Makes Her Way to Sante Fe

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name. Funny how songs get stuck in your head, and they’re situational. There’s a song for every scene in life, isn’t there?

Actually, the horse has a name – it’s Helen, like the actress Helen Mirren, but she’s really a Ford pickup, and we crossed Arizona and New Mexico yesterday. What beautiful country. We live in an amazing land. 

It’s been really fun this summer to see the rural parts of New York, the valleys and rivers of Pennsylvania, and the rural parts of West Virginia, all green and lush and rich. And then the stark, vast stretches of southern Nevada, the mountains of Northern Arizona, and that enchanted wasteland that just takes your breath away across New Mexico. 

I prefer the desert. 

I think as I cross it what would it be like to find a spot in the middle of nowhere and stay there for a couple of days in the silence. What the sky would look like at night?

No matter where I am, the thought always comes of what it must have looked like 300 or 1,000 years before we got here. Naked and peopleless. The coasts of California always bring this thought – wouldn’t that have been something to see? 

Today I will be stuck in a conference room in a hotel in Sante Fe, with all that beauty outside tempting me. But, Friday I head back with no work to worry about, and the cell phones will be in the back seat. Or maybe out the window. There will be detours and stops at tacky tourist traps and undivided attention to my return adventure. 

So while I head downstairs to federal government training, flip charts and all, we’ll still be right here…

…Keeping you Posted.

Rach