America First

It sounds xenophobic or dangerously patriotic or the title of some new Toby Keith song, but it's not, it's just a little marketing about our great, big country, not promoting our modest tax rate or our ability to get along, but it's beauty, natural and enhanced. At least that's what Ken Burns told me, I think, in America's Best Idea. It's what the railroads said when they told the Easterners and the residents of Cincinnati and St. Louis not to take that Grand Tour of Europe, but to see America First. It probably worked because Ken's film was full of sharp looking men and women in suits and dresses in our great outdoors and because I told Baleen right then and there that they were right, we lived in one big, great place that we needed to know better. She rolled her eyes and said, every 3-day weekend for the next 20 years we'll load the station wagon and the bug spray and fill Waffle House jukeboxes with quarters and see this country of ours. Let's go to Greece and Turkey now, America second. I kind of agreed, but held out hope and kept at it by getting her to wear a flag pin now and then and drink Budweiser on the 4th of July, but there's no need for any of that over the next four days, it's America first. 

We're off early for a weekend wedding in Albuquerque (it's taken me 3 months of emailing friends and family ab the trip to put U as the 4th letter instead of E) with two nights a few hours north, first in Ojo Caliente with their mineral springs and a second night in The Historic Taos Inn. Hot bananas. I'm even taking the Southwest drink coupons that I got years ago and have survived three moves as I'll finally be on a flight where I want to use them. Baleen's volunteered to drive the rental all four days you see, and with the $13/day second driver fee we'll save from the car rental agency, I think we'll plow the proceeds into green chiles. Though mom's gone behind my back and told Baleen I need to get her some turquoise jewelry, and not to let any turquoise we get in New Mexico to keep us from gold in Greece. Turquoise in New Mexico I'm fine with, but gold in Greece? It's a commodity, mom, purchased in a strong currency from a man with earnings in a weak currency. America first.