Close encounter of the tree kind

This week we were in three different states. Four if you count 'dismay'. Firstly, from a cool and mountainous Colorado we went to a warmer and slightly flatter New Mexico. Almost immediately one of the things you notice change is the architecture, with lots of pueblo-style adobe buildings everywhere. In fact, in places like downtown Santa Fe there's a strict building code that means all buildings have to be in this style, whether it's McDonalds or a covered car park. It makes the whole place seem a little bit twee and a bit fake – like you're walking around a Mexican theme park or something. Santa Fe is also a very 'arty' city and there are vast amounts of naff paintings and weird sculpture awaiting any tourists that happen to have more money than taste. In terms of attractions, Santa Fe sticks with the construction theme. For a start it boasts the "Miraculous Stairway", a spiral staircase in an old chapel that apparently shouldn't work as it has no traditional means of support. The miracle part, presumably, is that anyone cares. But wait, there's more. What could be more exciting than a staircase, you're probably wondering? How about the oldest house in the USA? There's a scene in Only Fools And Horses where Trigger claims to have had the same broom for 20 years, even though it's had 17 new heads and 14 new handles – well, the "Oldest House In The USA" is a bit like that. It turns out it is part of a house built in 1640-something on the site of something that may have been there in the 1200s that then fell into ruin and had to be rebuilt. Does that really count?

Time for another new state, and another new time zone, as we headed to Texas. We knew we were in Texas because all the cars had cow horns on the front. We headed to Amarillo to visit the Cadillac Ranch. This is a sort of art installation created in 1974 when three guys half-buried ten Cadillacs in a field with their rear ends sticking in the air (the cars' not the artists'). Anyone visiting the cars is actively encouraged to graffiti, paint or otherwise deface the cars with the result that they are constantly changing and will never again be as they were on the day we saw them. After nearly 40 years of this, they are thick with layer upon layer of paint. It's a beautiful thing to be in the presence of. We found that someone had kindly left a half-used aerosol can of paint by one of the cars, so Claire and I set to work adding our own marks to this ever-changing artwork. We wanted to write something that would be seminal and clever – but we couldn't think of anything so just scrawled our names a couple of times! I'm still hopeful that it may be seen by someone from the Turner Prize committee. Not being a nation to let a cash-in pass them by, we were heartened to see a local RV park had half-buried a motorhome as a tribute-cum-publicity stunt and we also saw a local billboard aping the Cadillacs – to advertise cowboy boots. Stunningly shameless and yet undeniably brilliant.

Just down the road from our campsite in Amarillo was The Big Texan, a restaurant famous for its enormous 72oz steak – which you get for free if you can finish it in an hour. I was toying with taking up this challenge until I read the long list of very strict rules that state you have to sit at a table for one, on a raised platform, in the middle of the dining room and, as well as the steak, you have to eat all the accompanying side dishes – a prawn cocktail, baked potato, buttered roll and a salad – and failure to finish means you lose the challenge and have to pay. And it's $72. That kind of put me off bit. Also, I don't know if this is in any way related, but there's a mortuary next door. Texas is definitely a state obsessed by the cow. When they're not eating great big chunks of them for sport or nailing bits of them to the front of their cars, Texans are farming them on a very large scale. As we left Texas we drove through a couple of towns called, suitably enough, Hereford and Bovina where there were just miles and miles of intensively farmed cattle. There were millions of them, crammed into pens as far as the eye could see. It was like battery farming and not a little disturbing. As was the colossal odour that permeated through the van as we drove past.

And so it was back to New Mexico and on to Roswell, scene of "The Roswell Incident", when a UFO famously crash-landed in 1947. Possibly. A local farmer was out, er, farming when he apparently found the wreckage of a spaceship embedded in his land. This wreckage also contained three dead aliens and one who was still alive and probably not that happy. The next day, however, the army had cordoned off the whole area, claimed it was nothing more sinister than a weather balloon, released some photos of a pile of Bacofoil and told everyone they should just forget that whole alien nonsense. Well, of course, nobody forgot about it and today the town is awash with alien nonsense. You cannot go five yards without seeing a little cartoon alien waving at you, welcoming you into a fast food restaurant or adorning everything from tattoo parlours to solicitors' offices. The street lamps have alien faces on them, the local McDonalds is built to look like a flying saucer and we even saw a post box painted to look like R2-D2. There's UFO paraphernalia everywhere and it can be quite distracting. So distracting in fact, that someone could easily be gawping at one of these little green men, lose concentration, and drive their rented RV a little too close to the low branches of a tree and rip one of its skylights to shreds. Hypothetically. I'm not sure I can claim extra-terrestrial interference on the insurance form though.

At the heart of Roswell and its alien infatuation is the UFO Museum And Research Center housed in an old cinema. The "museum" part of the building sets out the events of that fateful day in July 1947, mostly using signed statements from eye-witnesses as they lay on their deathbed many years later. It's not entirely clear what the "research" section of the establishment does. By the looks of it though, it may have spent a lot of the 80s and 90s visiting possible witnesses as they neared death in the hope that they'd agree to testify that there definitely was a UFO crash. There is then a large section given over to a diorama of what the aliens may have looked like, lots of awful paintings of aliens and badly drawn spaceships, some tenuously-related photographs of crop circles and a few "realistic" props that have been donated from various TV shows and films. The place boasts 150,000 visitors a year and, as it charges $5 per person, it should probably manage to look a little less tatty and amateur than it does. It was a fun way to spend an hour though – and helped take my mind off our own tree-based Roswell incident.

BURGER OF THE WEEK
I was hoping, what with being in Roswell and all, that I'd be able to bring you an Alien Burger or UFO Burger this week but, having scoured the town, it seems nobody in the burger business has any imagination. Would it have been so hard to put little oval eyes on a green olive or possibly used a fried egg as a flying saucer? I feel unbelievably let down. So, instead, I bring you my favourite choice from a traditional 1950s-style diner called Mel's – the Teriyaki Mushroom Melburger. A 1/3 pound pure beef burger sprinkled with Mel's special seasoning and topped with fresh sautéed mushrooms over a teriyaki glazed pineapple ring. It was deliciously juicy and wonderfully messy. And it came with curly fries!