I know, as a travel writer, I should love the open road–it’s practically a requirement for the job, that you rhapsodize about lost highways and such. And New Mexico has plenty of open road – or, as Beverly put it, “there are lots of middle-of-nowheres in New Mexico.”

The trouble is that the open road in New Mexico is punctuated by these crappy ass-of-nowhere towns that block the incredible views: Truth or Consequences, a settlement that’s 90 percent mobile homes; Deming, where people die in dust storms; or Lordsburg, where the freight trains rumble right down Main Street and the chain-link-fence salesman made his first million. (OK, fine, there are some very cool urban-dropout types and awesome coffee in T or C; El Mirador in Deming is a classic heartwarming diner where the Border Patrol agents eat next to recent Mexican immigrants; and I did have an excellent lunch in Lordsburg, at the Triple J Cafe. But in the last case, the padded toilet seat in the bathroom was almost too poignant, one tiny bit of comfort in this horribly bleak expanse.)

I really hit the wall on the last day of my trip, after 2,000 miles of driving, when I made the mistake of cruising through Belen and Los Lunas on the business loop. Just how many cheap plastic signs, junkyards, and cinderblock big-box stores can one person take? Not to besmirch Belen and Los Lunas – these are perfectly functional towns, and they’ll even be getting commuter rail service shortly, and they have some history and nice big trees. But it was a relief to get onto Isleta Pueblo land, and not see any buildings anymore.

Now, I live in Astoria, Queens, and I am the first to admit the neighborhood is just not that pretty, but to make up for the plastic signs, the (small) junkyards, and the vinyl siding, it has people, plenty of lively, interesting people from all over the place, who are selling me things and providing services, and generally making life delightful for one another. And I think that’s all humans are out to do, is delight one another.

So it seems creepy and sad when people live in isolation. They start doing obnoxious things like putting framed prints of the Muhammad-with-a-bomb-in-his-turban cartoon above their cash registers and carrying guns and looking at people funny.

But I’m being a grump. I did see some beautiful, beautiful vistas:

The de rigueur fence-to-the-horizon shot

View from Rockhound State Park (an otherwise boring place)

And on my last morning, I had a big slab of pie, at the Daily Pie Café, in Pietown, New Mexico. That sounds like a total tourist trap, but it’s not. In a wholesome approximation of a strip club, about four men in trucker caps were lined up at the diner counter, while the waitress strolled up and down and sassed at them, and dished up the pie and the coffee.

And then the bell on the door jingled, and in came the hunchiest, funkiest, oldest man in a red-check shirt and boots and an impossibly sweat-stained and frayed straw cowboy hat, and the waitress said, “Howdy, Floyd.” And Floyd shuffled slowly toward the counter, so I could see the bowie knife on one hip, the pistol on the other, and the shells stuck in his belt. I was in yet another middle-of-nowhere, but I had my pie, and I was delighted.