[this blog was written the morning of may 11, 2008, and is being posted a week late!]

so, here i am, with just a bit of time to spare to write a blog about our past week and hopefully post a few pics.

we're in albuquerque, as i mentioned last night, and we've spent the majority of this week camping in new mexico (in the cibola national forest). last weekend we spent three days in a row in motels, mostly because we were trying to go to juarez, [old] mexico from el paso, texas, on cinco de mayo monday evening.

it was fun. a bit anticlimactic. really really consumerist, not much partying going on, but the mercados were jam-packed with people, and i felt like a walking wad of cash the way vendors solicited us. unpleasant. then we went to a restaurant with some awesome food and some cheap beers, and our "waiter" got pretty friendly with us and started suggesting that he show us around the fun parts of juarez. in the end, he took us to a pool hall and walked us back to the bus. his "generosity" cost us $25, and i felt a bit worse for the wear after it was over.










while we stayed in el paso, we went to do a couple points in the wild, open area of fort bliss, nm. i was pretty nervous about the road conditions and having the tires on our tiny car blow up, without an inflated spare, but we were fine after all. then i came across a horned lizard and caught it, and he posed for a picture or two.

while we were sitting at a point in the fort, filling out crosswords to kill time, a pregnant sonoran pronghorn antelope quietly wandered up out of nowhere to investigate us! we quickly snapped some photos and she meandered off again while we watched with binoculars. that was pretty amazing.

then we went camping on a beautiful mountain in the cibola nat'l forest, where the wind was so strong and loud that neither of us really got any sleep in our tents. i did, however, purchase a PILLOW, an AIR MATTRESS and a BLANKET, which made my nights "roughing it" much more tolerable. i mean, it's really crucial to get a decent night's sleep, and i already have trouble with insomnia when my tent isn't trying to fly away.









most of our points have been in desert and low scrub land with few to no flowers and few to no hummingbirds. so it's usually a lot of sitting in the desert flicking ants off my knees and taking deep lungfuls of fresh air.
i have seen some flowers, though. a beautiful, brief flash of red, just like this claret cup we're keeping our eyes out for:i didn't sleep well last night but i did watch the newest episode of "lost," so i have plenty to think about until tonight's next camping locale.

two weeks in, and it's turning out to be a very different kind of experience.