Joey, Alicia, and I cut out from the family reunion early and hurriedly take off to New Mexico (other sister Emily is in Africa) with the plan to drive to southern Colorado to camp. But when we arrive to SoCo we are really enjoying the music so we switch drivers and continue on across the border. Darkness falls and things get weird. Clusters of glowing eyes in the open fields around us. Deer, rabbits, elk and undoubtedly...JACKALOPES!
I have never seen so many glowing eyes of varying shapes and sizes. ALL OVER THE ROAD.
After one of those tricky for-less-than-a-mile-the-speed-limit-drops-to-below-30-in-the-middle-of-nowhere speeding tickets we are driving 20 mph under the limit brooding over what I should have said to the cop when a moose jumps in front of our car and I have to slam on the brakes. Had we not gotten that ticket we likely would have hit the huge animal (turns out it was an elk- haven't had a moose in NM since the early 80's) and destroyed the car or ourselves. Good time to sleep.
Taos next morning with native american blue corn fry bread from the pueblo for breakfast:
Spent the night in Santa Fe and drove on to the bottomless lakes, an oasis outside of Roswell NM where we camped for a couple of nights for alien watching. We had a tough time getting there because the GPS woman led us to an abandoned road where we resolved that our GPS was controlled by NM bandits that would steal our car and sell us to Mexico if we continued to follow its/their directions.
I read that at the bottomless lakes a scuba diver made an attempt to reach the bottom, but he never came back up. They found his body a few weeks later in MICHIGAN! It had traveled through the extensive underwater canal system of the deep lake! I couldn't convince J & A that this was true (though they do believe in Jackalopes).
The Desert and Carlsbad Caverns:
It is 6:00pm- the guy at the gas station says the White Sand Dunes close at 5:00pm- they are an hour away- let's go anyways.
After several nights of camping in the heat and dusty wind, then a night in the car due to a creepy Deliverance-esque encounter, Ad booked us a bit of a luxury and I think this pic pretty much sums up how we all felt:
A night on the town in Albuquerque with a tour of old route 66, a drive to Farmington where the countryside was pretty but the balloon festival was cancelled, some ice cream and shiprock and on the road again.
Each time at the pump I wondered if this would be the last year that I could even think of going on a roadtrip due to the seemingly everlasting combustible engine. Watch "Who Killed the Electric Car?" if you don't already know. In one hour the sun produces 3.8 x 10^23 kilowatt-hours. Why can't my car use that for some extra oomph?
