Road Trip: Gallup

The drive from Austin to Gallup took most of Friday, but at our Gallup friend's recommendation we stopped in Albuquerque for dinner at El Pinto. We thought it was just a good restaurant she liked, but upon arriving we realized it's actually a giant old hacienda/garden complex that is a Big Deal. Inside they had pictures of all kinds of celebrities, politicians, and presidents that had eaten there.

Grand entrance

The food was excellent:

Those sopapillas, though. Wow.

We got into Gallup late so went straight to bed. This morning we started with breakfast at The Plaza Cafe, which is in a double wide trailer on the old Route 66. My friend has been telling me forever that they make the best french toast in the world, and she was not kidding:

Seriously, I would come back here just for that french toast.

We then walked around the Gallup flea market for a while, which is enormous and sprawling and has people selling everything from livestock to Navajo pottery and jewelry to tires to mattresses, and pretty much everything in between. I didn't take any pictures, but I did get some really excellent horchata. I also think I saw more Native people in that hour at the flea market than I have seen in my entire life up to today, which is pretty messed up.


According to our friend, ordinarily hiking would have been next on the agenda, but it was way too hot today so we just drove out to the red rocks and took some pictures with them.

Yes, weather is totally the reason I didn't climb up there.

So pretty

We then had a driving tour of Gallup, which most notably included the historic El Rancho Hotel, where lots of movie stars used to stay when they came out to NM to film Westerns. All the rooms are named after a celebrity who stayed there, but we only recognized a small number of the names, which I guess is kinda depressing for those (former) celebrities. Also, they had a bunch of pictures from the sets of movies that were shot in/around the hotel, including many with white actors in red face. Gross.

"Charm of yesterday, convenience of tomorrow" - I don't think historical racism is charming, and they don't even have today's convenience of wifi, so I am skeptical of their motto.

The lobby looks pretty much like I assume it did when it opened in 1937.

We spent the rest of the day preparing for and then having a 4th of July barbecue. The 4th of July here is nuts - Gallup was recently voted the most patriotic small town in America, and man do they show it, at least when it comes to fireworks. As soon as it got dark there were a TON of them going off everywhere, for hours - our friend lives on a hill so we had a great view as we ate and hung out all night. It was crazy because it seemed like everyone in town was setting off professional grade fireworks from their yards - some from her neighbors seemed like they were right on top of us. They are still going off sporadically as I write this. It's interesting that there is such strong patriotism in a town that is nearly half Native and a third Latino, given that neither group is typically depicted as being as "real" Americans as White people. I learned from my friend that Native people actually have the highest per-capita enlistment in the military of any ethnicity, which is also something that you don't typically hear about.

And on that note... happy independence* day!

* For straight, white, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, educated, property-owning, Christian, English men, that is.