On the Road Again...

8am came wayyy too soon this morning, after spending the last week sleeping until noon or later! But we got up, showered, packed, and were out the door by 9- quite an impressive feat if you know anything about us at all! It wasn't quite as difficult because we spent a lazy day yesterday resting and watching movies (Laura saw Curly Sue for the first time!), and Heather got to bed relatively early, in preparation for driving the first leg today... The only real accomplishment I can brag about from yesterday was helping Matt dis-assemble their Christmas tree from last year so that it would fit in the garbage can... It was amazing that even sitting out in their backyard, in TEXAS, all summer long, it was still green inside & very very sticky!! This should have been a very easy task for Matt alone, except for the fact that the only tools he had for the job were a pair of rather dull hedge-clippers, and a very flimsy hand saw (the kind that has a thin blade w/the handle attached to both ends so it looks like a big letter D...). So I clipped away at the smaller branches to clear a space for Matt to get in with the saw, and we ended up cutting the tree into 3 large pieces, and many, many loose small branches. I know I worked hard because I got a blister.

Anyways... back to today: Originally when we looked up our general destination in New Mexico, somewhere around Santa Fe, Google maps suggested the estimated driving time to be about 12 hours... So we planned accordingly: leave with enough time to drive 12 hours, with only the necessary pit-stops, and make it to the hostel before they close at 10. However, the actual location of the hostel is probably a little over an hour north of Santa Fe, and the gps didn't seem to be able to find the same route as Google maps, so when we plugged in the address, we were more than a little shocked when the estimated arrival time was 1:30am! So today, we navigated the old-fashioned way and used a road atlas! We may have had a few helping guidelines from Google maps on my phone (after all, what's the point of advanced technology if you don't use it?), but overall the atlas proved to be very useful and we proved to ourselves that we knew how to use it! :-)

So we left at 9am this morning, stopped for lunch at Schlotsky's Deli, and a few other times for gas, etc. and finally arrived at the hostel at 9:45pm for a total of 13 hours & 45 minutes on the road... Eat that, gps!! And no, we are not mathematically challenged- we actually saw 5:00pm happen twice today, thanks to the different time zones in TX & NM. By the way- Texas must be THE most uneventful state to travel through, consisting only of vast expanses of cotton fields and very flat, very boring landscape! New Mexico, on the other hand, is utterly breathtaking! We witnessed an amazing sunset across miles of beautifully painted desert terrain, and as nightfall approached, we caught glimpses of some of the mesas, plateaus, and other geological phenomena that we can't wait to capture more photographs of!

So now we are cuddled up under heavy blankets in our teepee, listening to the coyotes outside and greatly looking forward to the adventures we will have tomorrow!

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