Quote:
Originally Posted by plinko
Wow, haven’t been to those places in forever. PLEASE tell me you took either AZ 77 or AZ 79 to get between here and Tucson and not back to I-10. Both of those drives are really interesting (but for different reasons).
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Yes, we did take AZ-77 to get up to Globe (and on to Tonto National Monument on 188). Very nice drive.
And, to get to Phoenix, we took US-60---a route a co-worker recommended when we initially were gonna do a road trip to southern New Mexico (Silver City and environs). My co-worker's husband is from Silver City, and she told me to take the 60 instead of the 10 to Silver City because the 60 is a much more interesting drive than the 10, and it only takes about 15 minutes longer to get to Silver City that way.
And indeed it is. We saw this on the 60 on our way to Phoenix from Miami, AZ:
Photo by me
Photo by me
Photo by me
... A random shrine dedicated to someone. Very moving. My knee-jerk reaction is that it's a very Catholic shrine, but I guess it's a melding of Catholicism and folk-religion/beliefs, kind of like those roadside shrines you see throughout the southwest where someone probably died from getting hit by a car or something.
As an aside, I love the Southwest. Maybe it's because I'm from southern California, but I feel I identify more with Southwestern culture than I do with anything from the Midwest or Northeast, or the South. Plus I'm really into indigenous cultures, which seem more prevalent and obvious in the American Southwest. It seems that any evidence of indigenous cultures have all been erased in the Northeast, it being dominated by European settler culture. Also, the Northeast is dominated by Yankee culture; I'm more into the cultures that existed in the areas before the Yankees and Anglo-Americans took over, like the Hispano-cultures of the Southwest and California, and the French/Cajun/Creole culture of Louisiana. I've said it before on skyscraperpage, but I pretty much feel like I've seen everything I want to see in the US... but the only city in the US I haven't seen that I still want to see, is New Orleans. I've never been to Boston, and I used to want to visit Boston, but now it's low on my list; I'm more into visiting New Orleans. And I've already seen Tucson.
And I guess I'm really into New Mexico because I get the feeling there, more so than in Arizona, that true indigenous culture is prevalent there. And, not one ethnic group is the majority there. It's kind of like Hawaii in that sense. It's an even mix of ethnicities, and everyone seems to get along just fine. Maybe that's why New Mexico, Hawaii, and California are my favorite US states. Those states are not like the rest of the US.