surprised how sad I was to leave. In my 70 days there I grew to like the place pretty well. Now it isn't the greatest place in the world and I'm sure that I would find things wrong with it the longer that I lived there but the twin cities of Bryan/College Station are pretty cool. I mean it is a typical college town but the student's at least seem more respectful and it does have some interesting stuff to see. For instance we went to the WeinerFest on the Saturday before we left which was AWESOME in a weird sort of way. Imagine taking a bunch of dogs and dressing them up for a costume contest and then pitting them against each other in a race to end all races. Craziness ensues. The campus itself has quite a few interesting things. For instance how many places can you find a monument dedicated to roughnecking, a oil drilling rig and a monument to the past mascots where there is their own scoreboard so they can keep track of whether the Aggies are going to run out of time or not. My favorite was the sign for the local Hillel group though. This place IS amazingly friendly and I am sad that we have left.
So we are now on the second leg of our cross country tour. This route is a little more wandering then the one to TX. We actually started going south to San Antonio because I wanted to see the Alamo. The Alamo is pretty small for the surrounding area. It is kind of like seeing the Arch in Athens. You are expecting something just a little smaller than St. Louis and what you get is something MUCH smaller than St. Louis. Same here with the Alamo. There is also not much of it left after all it was a fort and it was kind of beat up and abused. We also visited the Riverwalk while there eating at the oldest restaurant there. I started calling it the Venice of Texas and John said the canals reminded him of the Small World ride at Disney World. After we paid our respects to the Alamo, we stopped by Barney Smith's garage to look at his toilet seat cover artwork. Now I know you are thinking we must be crazy but this guy is awesome. We found his museum by going to www.roadsideamerica.com which has to be one of the coolest places to find random and interesting places to stop by on your next road trip. Back to Mr. Smith. He is 87 years old and has been making his folk art toilet seat covers for over 40 years. He is up to 858 and is aiming to complete 1000. Some are funny, odd, and amazingly creative. John and I signed the Georgia toilet seat to mark our visit (we decided that one made the most sense right now) and then toured his collection. He does not sell or loan his collection out but we did get a souvenir for our Christmas tree of one of his fired ceramic toilet seat ornaments. He is an incredible man and so humble taking all his "fame" in stride. If you are in the area, give him a call. The museum is only open if you call him and he will meet you with so much enthusiasm so that you can see and share in his "little" hobby.
After spending an extended time with Mr. Smith, we headed to Carlsbad, NM. We stopped by Enchanted Rock which is a giant hunk of pinkish rock sticking out of the ground. It is kind of like Stone Mountain in GA except nothing is covered on the side of it. I took over driving and the Garmin decided we should take a more back roads route after visiting the Rock so we headed to middle of nowhere TX where there were a few loose livestock roaming the roads :)
The scenery in West TX was as we were told - nothing too remarkable. The scenery changed subtly but it was not too dull; however, there is a problem with roadkill especially the amount of skunks that are apparently killed. It seemed the whole drive was sprinkled with eau de skunk or the smell of gas/propane/yuck. We made it to Midlands, TX for dinner (hometown of First Lady Laura Bush and childhood home of "W" Bush). We decided to go ahead and make the push to get to Carlsbad. It was a crappy drive in the middle of the dark. The road was rough and it was super dark. No moon or anything. We kept our eyes open for alien encounters but we saw nothing (at least nothing we remember). Finally we made it to Carlsbad at 11pm and were completely exhausted.
This morning we woke up after a fitful night sleeping to head out to Carlsbad Caverns. We realized we didn't miss much last night on the drive. There is nothing on the roads except brush and the occasional tree. Also we found that Carlsbad smells a lot like gas of the human variety but once we got out to the Caverns all was better. Incredible vistas getting to the caves. The national park has a boarding area so that Vicky didn't have to stay in the hot car and we were able to take our time in the Caverns. We spent 2 whole hours to walk just the Big Room trail. Crazy big and spooky all at the same time. One of the rangers explained that there used to be more lighting (including red, green and blue-groovy man) in the 70s but is now reduced in lighting (and color). It's pretty amazing and we wished we had more time to hike from the natural entrance, but next time :) By the way I finally figured out what my superhero skill is - humidity girl. You can't tell so much in this photo but as the cave got colder and wetter, my hair got bigger and bigger. Ahhh...I love my hair :)We headed up to Roswell after chowing down at the park and picking up Vicky (the now very cranky chinchilla). Roswell was less than spectacular. I was expecting Alien central and there is like a block of alien stuff. The shop we went to had this deal that you could get your picture taken in front of a green screen which puts you in a number of alien themed scenes. Unfortunately they closed just as we were getting through the museum of alien contradictions (are there UFOs, are aren't there, you decide). I was seriously disappointed since that was all I really wanted was the stupid photo but we got an alien ornament and headed out for Starbucks (yea coffee). Then came the long, boring, monotonous drive to Albuquerque. Yep we were somewhere between nowhere and BFE. We hit a little scare when the car decided to bring up the empty light somewhere around "holy cow nothing but grass" and we were easily 45 miles from the next gas station. I've never done math so well to realize that we might be pushing to the gas station. Luckily we made it and switched drivers (my heart had enough of the stress). Then off to a sunset worthy of the picture on the NM license plate and our descent into homebase for the night. It is overall been crazy and tomorrow should be even more interesting. Stay tuned!
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