For an Albuquerque native like myself, watching AMC's television series "Breaking Bad" is an amazing experience, because so many of the locales are recognizable, or nearly so. Even though I live in California now, I yearn to see these places again, and find out where the nearly-recognizable places are located.
Interestingly, this part-time Albuquerque resident has experienced the same yearning, and she devoted a lot of effort to tracking these places down, taking pictures of them, and posting Google placemarks. Like me, she had become obsessed with the precise shooting locales.
For example, the high school was driving me nuts, because it clearly was one of the newer high schools in town - but which one? She identifies the high school as Rio Rancho High School. The school didn't exist when I lived there, but when I was in high school I used to love to hike to Loma Colorado, the large, red hill that gives the school's street its name, and look at the ancient Rio Grande river mud frozen into rock on the hillside there. Ah, memories! When I visit in July, I want to take a little time and do something similar, analogous, or complementary to what she did.
There must be something about being expatriate Albuquerqueans that makes the yearning so keen for us. For much of my life, all I wanted to do was get away from seeing the Hi-Lo Market every day. Now, all I want to do is make sure the Hi-Lo Market is still there. And did I ever anticipate wanting to see the Octopus Car Wash again? I mean, who could ever have anticipated that?
Judging from a few comments on some Web Site I was looking at yesterday, I think there might be small-scale tours led by fans already underway in town. If the series continues, it could even become a small-scale business, reminiscent of the bus tours of SF's Haight-Ashbury District in the 60's; or, more recently, LA's 'Cholo' bus tour, or the bus tour of the Colorado Strip polygamous communities of southern Utah and northern Arizona. "Here we have a typical Albuquerque mobile home, and its atypical low-life owner. Wave at him, folks: for a fee, he'll let you take his picture! Despite his ferocious, whacked-out appearance, and his numerous tattoos, he's pretty clean, and excepting that one bad week in 2002, he's been off drugs since 1995!"
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