Day 13-14: Texas, New Mexico

We started Friday with our first pancake breakfast during the holiday. And they were really good! With that breakfast we could easily manage until late dinner :) our first stop was the laundry place. It was surprisingly expensive (around 10$ for washing all our stuff) and we were thinking that it would be quite easily justified just to buy your own washing machine instead of going to a laundry place once a week. R was also the only man there, and we felt ourselves very modern when he started to fold the laundry, and probably the others thought "poor guy" :)

This sounds like our road!

Our target was a National Park just outside of Fredericksburg. While driving there, the weather started to be a bit bad and by the time we were at the gates, there was a thunderstorm. Not the ideal day for hiking then. We turned back and spotted some kind of moose-like animal by the side of the road. Our leading zoologist is still debating with himself, what the animal exactly was.

We decided to make it a driving day instead, and set the course for Roswell, New Mexico. We decided to spend the night in Middletown/Odessa. Which turned out to be a baaaad idea. All the hotels were crazy expensive, and the town was full of little oil pumps and nothing interesting to see. It turned out to be the hometown of George and Laura Bush, which also maybe explains their oil connections. We finally ended up in a super-8 motel, paying way too much and being in a room which obviously had seen its best days. We heard, that during the week all the hotels/motels are usually reserved for the oil workers, but they go back to their families for the weekend.

On Saturday we thought that let's leave as soon as possible away from there. We crossed the border of New Mexico and the landscape changed a lot. Big plateaus of nothing basically, and where Texas had an oil pump here and there, in New Mexico we first saw none. Later on, we started to see mini oil pumps, which could be fitted to somebody's back yard.

Driving & relaxing :)

We drove to Roswell, no sign of aliens though. We went to a local UFO museum, but it did not convince us of a UFO really landing to Roswell, it was fun though :) we grabbed some lunch and headed onwards to Santa Fe. The drive was roughly 170 miles of straight road with barely visible signs of human life. Luckily we had gotten some gas before this. We came to Santa Fe, and found a really nice Inn just outside of down town.

New Mexico landscape

We decided to go to the city, which is one of the oldest capitols of the US. It was probably the closest you can get to Mexico without going there. It felt like coming to a pueblo 100 years ago. Santa Fe has a central square, where was performing a group with xylophone's playing samba. It was really cool. After listening for a while, we went to get some dinner. No wonder Santa Fe is one of the most popular travel destinations in the southwest USA. Really nice place!

We found a labyrinth, and of course we needed to solve it

Dinner on a Obama table

Our sleeping place

With the speed we are proceeding, we could probably go to Canada and back without problems :) therefore we are hoping soon to find some hiking areas where we could spend few days. Next up - Colorado!