Summer on the Loop

There is something about the summer that sends me gravitating towards the business loop.  Or there is something about the business loop that draws me there in summer.  It's the closest I have in Columbia to a Tucumcari-type photo experience.  And if you've followed my blog at all, and I don't blame you if you haven't, I consider Tucumcari to be the photographer's equivalent of the Valley of the Kings to an archaeologist.  So with that said, here is an aging Mercury Marquis that I unearthed there one hot, July morning. 

Hello, Tucumcari!

Last night my night photography blog decided it had endured enough of this summer's exorbitant heat and drought, and packed its bags for a week or two of the relatively cool, beer-friendly environs of Milwaukee.  In some sort of URL solidarity, my Missouri blog today decided that it, too, needed to leave town for a few posts.  Strangely enough, it is on its way to Tucumcari, New Mexico.  Coincidentally, I was out in Tucumcari a couple summers ago for a very-belated honeymoon trip to Santa Fe and Taos.  For me, driving into Tucumcari from the high plains of west Texas and eastern New Mexico is like stumbling off the street into an extremely fascinating visual/historical/creative/photographic garden of wonders and immediately being offered a smorgasbord meal and a chilled microwbrew.  I mean it is full of the kind of photographic offerings that a person such as myself dreams of encountering.  So let's all take a hiatus from the occasionally predictable surroundings of central Missouri and spend a few days in Tucumcari.  I think the change will do us all a bit of good.  The image above is somewhere on Main Street, a block or two off of Route 66.  The repetition of the square and rectangle, along with the muted color palette, are what drew me to this scene.