At Tailhook15, Day Zero
If you ever wondered what The Tailhook Convention looked like on setup day, there it is.
Aside from a major traffic jam between Needles and Barstow on Monday, the drive out here was mostly good. I mentioned the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City and the End of The Trail statue. The next day there was the majorly wide-open spaces vista coming out of Albuquerque (sheesh-always need spell check on that one), the petrified forest, the painted desert. And of course the names of the towns along old Route 66. We drove across the country a goodly number of times and spent a night in a motel in so many of them: Clinton, Oklahoma (but that doesn’t make me a Democrat), Amarillo, Tucumcari, Gallup, Flagstaff, Kingman. I remember looking seeing the countryside around those towns as god forsaken, but places big enough to have a motel were havens, where the six penned-up-all-day-in-the-car-with-no-place-to-burn-energy kids could escape confinement for a bit. Going through that baked, burned brown part of the country this time, I guess I mostly was filled with admiration for the hardy folks who settled it, which took my mind back to the End of The Trail statue. At any rate, there was time for thinking during the drive. Not too much, because a feller can get a headache with too much of that.
Yesterday I visited too good friends from the good old days in Ridgecrest CA. One had a sign hanging on a doorknob. It read: Of Course I live in the Past. It’s cheaper there. Well, it may be cheap, but it’s also a rich place. It’s the place where you met lifelong friends.
And so onto to Tailhook15, which is what that is all about.
If you ever wondered what The Tailhook Convention looked like on setup day, there it is.
Aside from a major traffic jam between Needles and Barstow on Monday, the drive out here was mostly good. I mentioned the Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City and the End of The Trail statue. The next day there was the majorly wide-open spaces vista coming out of Albuquerque (sheesh-always need spell check on that one), the petrified forest, the painted desert. And of course the names of the towns along old Route 66. We drove across the country a goodly number of times and spent a night in a motel in so many of them: Clinton, Oklahoma (but that doesn’t make me a Democrat), Amarillo, Tucumcari, Gallup, Flagstaff, Kingman. I remember looking seeing the countryside around those towns as god forsaken, but places big enough to have a motel were havens, where the six penned-up-all-day-in-the-car-with-no-place-to-burn-energy kids could escape confinement for a bit. Going through that baked, burned brown part of the country this time, I guess I mostly was filled with admiration for the hardy folks who settled it, which took my mind back to the End of The Trail statue. At any rate, there was time for thinking during the drive. Not too much, because a feller can get a headache with too much of that.
Yesterday I visited too good friends from the good old days in Ridgecrest CA. One had a sign hanging on a doorknob. It read: Of Course I live in the Past. It’s cheaper there. Well, it may be cheap, but it’s also a rich place. It’s the place where you met lifelong friends.
And so onto to Tailhook15, which is what that is all about.