![\"Cross-country](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cross-country-2015-14.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Even just 800 miles into this trip, I don’t care if I never see another “unspoiled” landscape again. Spend enough hours driving through rolling hills or dry scrub or big skies or whatever, and you \u2014 or at least I \u2014 start to long for any sign of civilization, no matter how unpromising, even just a billboard telling you you’re going to hell. And so I met the modest Albuquerque skyline, the pyramidical tops of the Albuquerque Plaza towers jutting stubbily but distinctively into the air, with something like rapture. Finally, back in a city \u2014 maybe only the 34th largest in America, but a city nonetheless!<\/p>\n
![\"Cross-country](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cross-country-2015-15.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
There we stayed in what I consider one of America’s truly, fascinatingly generic spaces: a Holiday Inn Express. I’ve only stayed in about a dozen Holiday Inn Expresses in my time, but even that has led me to expect that, when you stand inside one, you stand in no particular neighborhood, no particular city, and indeed no particular country: you stand in a Platonic hotel realm, standardized to perfection. The Holiday Inn Express realizes, to bring it back to\u00a0A Single Man<\/em>, George’s vision of America, in which\u00a0a “hotel\u00a0room isn\u2019t a room in a hotel, it\u2019s the room, definitively, period. There is only one: The Room. And it\u2019s a symbol \u2014 an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like \u2014 for our way of life. And what\u2019s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you\u2019ve got to supply for yourself.”<\/p>\n And so, despite spending two nights in Albuquerque’s Holiday Inn Express, I perhaps spent even less time in Albuquerque than I thought. I often laugh at those\u00a0New York Times<\/em> “36 Hours in…” travel guides, but the country-crossing exigencies of this trip put me in a psychological position where I’d kill for 36 hours in one city. But their “36 Hours in Albuquerque”<\/a>\u00a0didn’t include what, for me, ranks as a destination of paramount importance: Burt’s Tiki Lounge, which Thrillist’s guide to the tiki bars of America<\/a> describes as “like stepping into a TGI Friday’s that married a dive bar in Oahu, then wandered off into the desert to raise their weird kids.” Alas, my desperate need for such a dive went unfulfilled; we turned up at 8:30, when every reliable source said they’d open in the evening, but its\u00a0doors stayed locked, its neon stayed unlit.\u00a0The on-the-ground impression I take from New Mexico’s largest city thus amounts to not much more than brightly colored freeways and metal sculptures of various desert creatures real and imaginary.<\/p>\n![\"Cross-country](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cross-country-2015-17.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Cross-country](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Cross-country-2015-18.jpg\")
<\/p>\n