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Every town has some attraction and just outside Albuquerque is Tinkertown.
Tinkertown is a collection of all sorts of things but mainly carved figures,
and was the work of one man, . It is situated near Sandia Crest to the east
of Albuquerque. |
| Many of the walls are constructed from glass bottles
stacked then cemented together but it is the hand carved people which are
the main attraction. |  |
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Not all the characters are carved, some are collectible characters like Snow
White seen here with the Seven Dwarves and many other characters. |
| Many of the scenes are set up as doll's houses with
all the furniture one might find in a pioneer town early in the century. |  |
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Many of the scenes have simple automation and the characters move either by
the push of a button or by insertion of a quarter. |
| This one looks like a store selling tourist items with
minute baskets and pots. |  |
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The undertaker is off to boot hill but there are angels and devils all
around. Some of the characters are quite fanciful. |
| A different set of scenes depict a three ring circus.
Here we have the band and banners advertising some of the attractions. |  |
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There is so much going on in some of the scenes. You would need to spend
ages looking to spot all the little mini-scenarios. |
| He obviously had an interest in boats at some time.
This is a 35 ft wooden boat, built in 1936 in Maldon, Essex, despite the
fact that we are currently about 1000 miles from any sea and rather further
from England. |  |
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are many signs with altruisms. The one on the right is interesting since it
reflects a view held by many Americans. |
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| To counter it is the sign just above these ladies.
'Travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow mindedness and many people need it
badly!' Attributed to Mark Twain in 1869. |  |
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Quite what the connection is between the carved characters and this
collection of angled spanners, I have no idea, but it reminded us of the
Harold Warp Pioneer Museum we visited last year. Collecting collections
seems to be an American thing. |
| I did like this face on a cast plaque just built into
a wall. |  |
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Outside are a few more artistically arranged sets of ironwork and a few more
truisms. The guy who built it has died now but Tinkertown is run in his
memory by his family. |
| We continued on towards Santa Fe only 60 miles away
amidst more of the same scenery we have been in for over a week but this
time including hills rising to over 10,000ft. |  |
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We could have travelled by the interstate but we chose to travel by a byroad
known as the Turquoise Trail. |
| We stopped off at Madrid, not the capital of Spain but
a tourist trap along the way. Today it is full of artists of all sorts and
art and craft shops selling their wares, expensive as these arty places tend
to be. One of the cafes was featured in a biker movie called Wild Hogs so
that now also makes it a place of pilgrimage for hogs (Harley Davidson
riders). |  |
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It began life as a mining town where both hard and soft coal were dug out of
the same mine (there are only two other such mines in the world). It became
a ghost town when mining ceased, but there is a small museum which was
unfortunately closed today. I'm always a sucker for an old steam engine. |
| As we travelled on we started to run parallel to the
railway line and were overtaken by a rare Amtrak passenger train. Almost all
rail traffic in the US is freight. |  |
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