Colorado Stuff 2015: Tinkertown And The Road Home

After spending an extra couple of days in New Mexico, I have this to say about Albuquerque: It's a pretty nice city! I wasn't sure what I expected, but the girls and I really enjoyed our stay there. True, some parts of town aren't beautiful, but just like Tucson, Albuquerque has plenty of nice neighborhoods to balance out the less nice ones. It's got pretty mountains surrounding it (I always prefer cities with nearby mountains!). And the climate isn't half-bad, either. It's about 10-15 degrees cooler than Tucson at the same time of year. They get actual snow in the winter (we've driven through it before; we know it happens!). And Albuquerque has some decent cultural/family activities to offer as well, as we discovered when we visited the BioPark.

Long story short, we would be happy to visit Albuquerque again in the future and explore it (or "re-explore" it) some more. But now it was July 10, 2015; we'd been away from home for almost two weeks, and we were ready to be reunited with Nathan and sleep in our own beds. But before driving the final hours to Arizona, there was one more place we wanted to discover...

...the Tinkertown Museum! I can say, without hyperbole, that this is one of the oddest places I've ever visited in my life. But I'm not sorry I saw it, either...a place that strange simply has to be seen to be believed.

Calling Tinkertown a "museum" is a bit of a stretch...it doesn't celebrate high art or culture, nor does it display any great historical artifacts or promote science and discovery. More than anything else, Tinkertown is a celebration of forgotten things; knick-knacks and oddments that were once commonplace but are now all but extinct. Old habits, traditions, and ways of life that are only practiced now by the remote few. Machines, tools, games, toys, weapons, and jewelry that no one ever uses any more. Poems, songs, stories, and legends that were once told and retold, and are now passing out of the collective consciousness.

As you can see, it can be hard to properly describe the place.

Tinkertown seeks to preserve all these things and more...and it does so in an incredibly cramped, random, haphazard way. The "museum" is really the former home of its founder, Ross Ward; it has been converted into a shrine bit by bit over the years, and is anything but uniform in appearance and quality. In fact, the makers of the television show Hoarders would have a field day with this place.

Walkways criss-cross one another leading to various wings of the museum; old trucks and wagons litter the woods behind the outer walls. Ward carved literally hundreds of wooden figurines and painstakingly created dozens of old-fashioned dioramas for these characters to exist inside. Many of these dioramas are lit by old strings of Christmas lights, and are animated by crude motors.

 

And these dioramas exist alongside collections of old Spanish swords, circus programs, dime-store toys, and fortune-telling machines from Coney Island. Some of these things are piled high, almost to the ceiling, blocking out other equally obscure and random memorabilia.

 

After a while, it became too much to fully process, so I had to skim most of the exhibits. I only remember bits and pieces of most of the rooms; there's just too much randomness there!

Oh, and did I mention the boat in the back of the museum, that was used to sail around the world in the 1990s?

 

 

It included a map of all the owner's travels (he lived in this boat for close to a decade!). It was so weird, yet inspiring at the same time. Way to live your dream, buddy!

And let's not forget the room with the glass-bottle walls. Well, actually, lots of the walls in Tinkertown were built this way. But one of those rooms had a pad of paper and pencils in it. Visiting kids were encouraged to leave a note inside one of the bottles. The kids had fun writing them. Lorelai in particular spent a lot of time coming up with random comments to write...which made sense, considering how random Tinkertown is to begin with.

 

Recycling was also a big deal for the Tinkertown employees. There were several hummingbird feeders outside the main entrance that were made out of crushed cans. Lots of the signage around the museum was made from recycled material as well.

I don't normally do much shopping at museum gift shops, but I decided to make an exception with Tinkertown.

The gift shop was just as random and goofy as the rest of the place, and I thought it would be fun if the girls got these "surprise bags"...

I've seen several gift shops that sell these. They're brown paper bags filled with a bunch of toys & trinkets. But you have to buy the bag before you can open it! Sometimes the items inside are more valuable than others...but they're always surprising! I thought a gift like that would be a perfect memento of our time at this place. We picked two of the "girl"-themed bags, paid for them, and immediately tore them open!

There was nothing earth-shattering inside, but it was a lot of fun stuff! A few pieces of candy, several bracelets & necklaces, lots of small plastic toys, a sketch pad, a Chinese finger trap, and more. It was fun to watch the girls divvy up their "loot." It was a good way to say "goodbye" to Tinkertown. I'm not sure if we'll ever return to this place, but I don't think I'll ever forget it either...I've never seen anything quite like it!

In order to get to Tinkertown, you have to drive a little ways outside of Albuquerque, and up the Sandia Pass, a beautiful scenic drive. It was easy to forget that dry, brown Albuquerque was just a half-hour away. We decided to drive further up into the mountains and have a little picnic lunch.

The Sandia Trail was a beautiful drive! It reminded me a little bit of Mount Lemmon near Tucson...a summertime escape from the heat. However, the Sandia Pass is easier to get to than Mt. Lemmon, so it has a proximity advantage.

We really enjoyed our lunch amongst the pine trees. After that, we decided to stretch our legs just a little bit more by taking a short nature trail to an overlook.

 

I looked longingly at the last forest I'll be seeing for a while (I miss you already, Colorado Rockies!). After this short foray into the wilderness, it was time to drive back down the mountain and head for the interstate. Our drive home to Arizona was uneventful. We saw lots of storms moving across the landscape, and got rained on several times, but otherwise it was smooth traveling. Our longer stay in New Mexico left me feeling a little more tired by the end of the trip, but overall I think it was worth it, to discover some neat new corners of these places that we had never discovered before.

And thus ends my account of our big trip to Colorado for the summer! It was a much-needed break in our everyday routine. I'm grateful for all the fun times we had, but at the end, I was most grateful to be home. Life, of course, started up again in earnest once we made it home, but isn't that always the way it goes? I hope I can get caught up on our summer (and the month of August) before more time passes!