The drive from Alamogordo, New Mexico, to southeast Kansas has been made many times by our family over the years. Tom and I lived there, and our daughter was born in Alamogordo in the early 1990’s. Currently when we have occasion to drive between Kansas and the California coast, we stop overnight at a lovely bed and breakfast in Alamogordo that we like very much. One reason we like it so much is they welcome travelers with cats, and we always have our cats with us. (If you ever stop by Tavares Inn tell Debbie and Bob that I recommended them!)
So after a wonderful pancake and egg breakfast we started off on our jouney of about 750 miles or so. We expected it to take about 12 hours, maybe a bit longer. We drive the speed limit, we did not stop to eat lunch or dinner, we only stopped for gas. One time we did make an extra stop for coffee. In Roswell.
We’ve driven through Roswell many times and its always fun to see the local merchants play up their “we had aliens visit us” event. Here is a photo I snapped from the window on our way to the coffee shop:
Interesting how the sunbeam shone on the poster. There are many such posters and references around the town. We picked up the coffee and headed north.
That’s when I noticed something strange… about, well, about the time. We just kept driving and driving and driving and we didn’t seem to be making the progress we should have been making. We had no traffic. No construction, no wrong turns, nothing to slow us down.
Lauren slept through most of this strange period. But the cats and I did not.
That’s Bennett. She was helping me watch the road.
It was so odd. I kept looking at the clock, at the odometer and saying, “What is going on?” It was too odd almost to even describe. The best way I can think of putting it is, it felt sort of like if you were walking on a moving sidewalk, but in the wrong direction.
Time seemed to be slipping out from under us and we were trying to catch up. It wasn’t until we were well into Oklahoma that it felt like the road was solid and moving the way it should be underneath our wheels and that the clock was moving correctly.
We arrived at the farm, more than 15 hours after we left the Tavares Inn.
Do I think we were “abducted by aliens”? No. I am not implying that at all nor do I think that is what happened. But I do think something strange happened to linear time while we passed through Roswell.
In fact, I think something strange is happening to linear time to many people and to this whole planet. If you start to pay attention, I bet you will notice this too. I have had the sense, as many have, that time is actually speeding up. And as odd as that concept has felt over the last little while, I have gotten sort of used to it.
Perhaps that is why the time slowdown was so odd.
