Saturday, July 24, 2010

One last Tourist Trap for the Tourists


When Beth and I were newlyweds and we traveled, we always tried to get off the beaten track. We tried hard to go where there were no tourists. A few years ago we realized we were tourist anywhere we went. On the beaten track were actually some very cool things we were missing out on. Road Side America had very little listings for New Mexico, but one caught our eye; Tinkertown. It was on the way from Madrid to the Airport.


I really did not know what to expect, but when we saw this sign the curiosity was tweaked.


A picture is worth a thousand words. Here is 1021 words then. It kind of explains the museum...


The guy who built this place must have had a lot of fun doing it. There were all kinds of metal bits transformed into sculpture.


It takes a lot of time to take it all in.


The museum is built of all kinds of salvaged materials collected in the surrounding hills and desert. When it was began, there were very few people out here. Now as people commute to work, many houses and developments have sprung up in the area.


Everything is free form construction using stone, wood, bottles, and lots of mortar.


I have seen bottle houses before. What makes this place so unique is the combining of materials.


There are a lot of bottles...


and a lot of whimsy...


There are a bunch of these dioramas. There were all kinds of buttons for the kids to push to make things move. Every element of the circus was present there.


There was this Freak Show diorama also. There was a representation of every freak possible. The only one missing in the display was me. This was one very cool museum. Very worth the $8 it cost our family to get in. I could have spent another two hours here looking at it all over again, but we needed to eat before going to the Airport.



As good as this meal looks before we started to eat, it was far from good. We made the mistake of going to Old Town Albuquerque and wound up in a tourist trap. Yep, a total tourist trap unlike the very worth it Tinkertown. We left dissatisfied for the Airport. I dropped Beth and Halle off and headed back to Tim's. Oh, did you think it was over? We had a free ticket and we had some vouchers. In order to use them, we had to split up on the airlines. Ava and I still had about 30 hours to do something fun. In my next post, I will tell you all about the killer adventure Tim took us on the following day.

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