Day 24: Austin to Santa Fe, NM

Mom and I left really early today, because google maps told us this was going to be a 14 hour driving day. And it kinda felt like that, what with the 5 hours of driving just to get out of TEXAS (remind me never to drive across Alaska which, if I hear tell correctly, is the only state larger than Texas.) (Although, believe me, I did not mention that while I was *in* Texas...:P)

By the way, nowhere in Texas did it actually look like the Texas I expected, and we drove clean across the state. It was all sort of much more green than I expected, and we never ran into any kind of oil fields. Perhaps they are farther north? Or farther southeast than we went?

We stopped in Roswell - we HAD to - and looked for food. We got a little sidetracked by the UFO Museum and Research Centre, which was EXTREMELY interesting. In a can't-look-away-from-the-traffic-accident kind of way...incidentally, a few days later, when Mom and I were at a hotel with TVs in the room, we saw a special on how many scientists believe that memories of alien abduction are, in fact, caused by sleep paralysis. Interesting. As my mom points out, however, it doesn't explain those troubling crop circles...

Other than the many UFO-related businesses, Roswell is a bit of a sad, dead town; a theme we saw repeated all across New Mexico. It's a beautiful place, but I'm guessing there's not a lot going on with the economy there. Very sad.

We made it to New Mexico in plenty of time, after less than 12 hours of driving - heck, the swimming pool at the Motel 6 was still open when we got there! (But, uh, full of screaming children, so we didn't go in.) Unfortunately, we learned a hard lesson upon our arrival there: when Motel 6's advertise that there are internet dataports in each room, what they *actually* mean is that you can unplug the cord from the phone, plug it into your computer, and dial up your own internet service. Um, okay. Then what you really have in the room is a "phone", right? Stop with the false advertising!!!

So, night #1 of no internet access for us. Sigh.