Driving Over The Continental Divide

Today I drove over North America's continental divide. Cool. But what is a continental divide? I had no idea.

Well:

A series of mountain ridges extending from Alaska to Mexico that forms the watershed of North America. Most of it runs along peaks of the Rocky Mountains and is often called the Great Divide in the United States.

Does that make sense?

Nope.

The way it was explained to me by a local is that this is the dividing line of where our nation's water goes. To the West of this line, water eventually falls into the Pacific Ocean and nearby places; to the East of the line, the water flows to the Atlantic and nearby places.

That is a pretty cool, if useless, piece of information I'm going to have to bring up during small talk someday.

It's also a great place for a gift shop, like Bowlin's Continental Divide Trading Post, the Wal-Mart of New Mexico travel trinkets. One has to stop here when driving on Interstate 10 in New Mexico, if only for the reason that there are 30 billboards in a three mile radius that tells you to go there.

I was intrigued. Plus, I wanted to say I was near the continental divide.

For no reason at all, there is a teepee there.

You know what you're getting into when you walk into the place. The first thing you see are knives for sale. Well, I guess it's better than that El Paso pawn shop that had guns for sale.

You can also get your rattlesnake head key chains.

A fine selection of Indian figures are available for reasonable prices.

But this is a place to buy fireworks.

Enough to blow up every building in Continental Divide, NM.

The people in the store were nice, and I almost bought a t-shirt for five bucks, just because I could.

If you'd like to know more about the area, you can learn more than you really would want to by visiting here. You can also check out Match.com's selection of area singles.

Forgive me folks, when you're making a 2000+ mile drive from Los Angeles to Atlanta, you have to find ways to kill time.

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America's Treasures