If you have not been to Pie Town, New Mexico, I’m not sure what you’re waiting for. We’ve seen so many places, and laughed at so many town names. Uranus, Missouri, for example, or Huzzah, Louisiana. But Pie Town was the most memorable of the small towns. It was out of our way – we were intending to go through Albuquerque. But DH found the name amusing. On the way, I did research, and the more we read about it, the more we wanted to go and meet everyone, and try the namesake delicacy, of course.

We thought, well, there may not even be an RV park there. But of course there is. The website for the park is enough to pull us in, if the pie hadn’t already. We contacted the owner of the park to ensure there was a spot, and mentioned our hope to try the pie. She told us we had to get pie from the Windmill Museum and let us know that although the museum might be out of pie by the time we got there, we could call them and ask to have some set aside for us. I called and left a message, and a little bit later, the owner of the RV park called back, from the Museum, to say, “Cyndi has been busy, so I ran down here – what kind of pie would you like?” We went for the Southwestern Apple, naturally – red chili, apples, pinon nuts – and we weren’t sorry. On leaving Pie Town, there was a frozen Southwestern Apple tucked away in our freezer for our visit with my folks.

Pie Town is high up, at 8k ft elevation, and the weather was lovely. There isn’t much there – if you blink, you’ll miss it, but what is there is rich with history and honestly, just the nicest damn people you’d ever meet. Within an hour of arriving in Pie Town, we’d met people from England, from the city I lived in, in California, and an RV neighbor who had family in the very small California town I grew up in. Bizarre small world encounter – though they told us, “This happens all the time here!”

The sunsets are stunning – from that elevation, it would be hard for them to not be – and we had excellent seats to a lightning show, as well. I didn’t want to leave.

As if the kindness, and the name, and the pie, and the lovely hospitality weren’t enough to make it feel magical, when we left Pie Town, we lucked into a glimpse of a Sonoran Pronghorn herd. There are only 160 of them left in the US, and we saw 6 or 7. They’re known as “Prairie Ghosts,” and you can understand why – we stopped and pulled out our zoom lenses, and though we were a good mile or two away from them, off they went, white bottoms puffed up, all skittish, over the next hill.