Postcards from the road to ABQ

While I was driving over to ABQ, as I tend to do, I jotted a few my thoughts on the scraps of paper within arms reach.

Here's a few of the sights and sounds I noticed on the road to Albuquerque...

-The way it worked out, to cross over to Arizona I had to cross the bottom tip of Nevada, which was a ten-minute drive past one casino. Seriously.

-Whoo-hoo we're in Arizona now! If I was filming this, this is where I'd have a long silence followed by a bored face. (No offense AZ, that's just comedy... and you're boring.)

-The gasoline in Arizona smells like the gas in California used to, like when I was a kid. That garlic-like scent that smelled kinda good, but was not at all a good idea to sniff from the car while your dad was filling up the tank. We did some stupid things as kids.

-Hello Flagstaff, AZ. Pretty cool place, it's a little touristy, but it somehow still fells real. Hunger was calling, I hadn't ate in 15 hours, it was time to score some grub. I didn't want to have the normal fast food so Lonely Planet clued me in on a Mediterranean restaurant with a southwest kick that was inexpensive. I spent about half an hour looking for it, at one point I manage to go the wrong way down the ONLY one way street in town. All that to find out that the reason I can't find the place is because it went out of business. I guess Planet was wrong, it's wasn't an institution.

-I'm so glad my car has air conditioning, although it's not so bad. I think the humidity in Miami and NYC helped me develop a whole new tolerance.

-Stars at night.... wow, I wish I could go camping in the desert and just stare up at the stars all night long. What a show. People out here may be used to it, but seeing a meteor shower in a pitch black landscape is a luxury I had not been privy to before. Now the thought in the back of my head of what creepy craw-lies might be around my feet is a luxury I don't want to have.

-Cross off two major rivers from the list. Cruised by the Colorado River in Arizona and later the Rio Grande in ABQ. Nothing special... they're narrow bodies of water moving downhill... I saw 'em... whoop.