In the morning we tiptoed over the sleeping forms in the living room, left a thank you note, and made our exit. It was already 9:30, so we shared an orange in the car and got on the road. We were rushing to hit Albuquerque by 11, as there was a dance being performed then at the Indian Cultural Center. We drove quickly and squealed into the parking lot at about 10:58 and ran into the lobby and danced impatiently as the curator went over the map with the people in front of us. Finally, and I do mean
finally, the curator let the people go and took our $6 admission. It was then that we saw the sign that the dance was actually at 12, not 11. So we were much less impatient while the curator went over every detail of the map with us, including where pictures were allowed and where they weren't.
We wandered through the cultural center for a while, and came to our favorite part of any museum - the kids' room. We got to try our hand at weaving at a loom!! As we sat there, trying to weave the stick through the vertical strings, a lady came by and showed us how to push the stick through at the top, where the strings were already separated for us. Ooooohhhh. So we managed to weave one line of the rug. Next, we were supposed to switch the strings to weave the second line. The directions said to pull one stick up and over the other to reverse the strings. We sat and tried for about 10 minutes, but this proved too complicated for us. We finally had to admit that we wouldn't have made very good Indian women, and give up on our weaving careers. The children's room also had clay to make pottery, but we were too discouraged by our weaving failure and didn't want to fail at pottery too, so we went back to the adult section.
Soon it was 12, and we went outside to watch the dance. There is a dance every week, and this week there was only one dancer. He showed us some traditional dances from his tribe, and his wife sang songs she had written about Indian culture. The best was when he invited us to dance. We jumped up, and some brave souls followed us, and we held hands and danced in a circle and then snaked around in loops and figure eights. He taunted the chickens who were too afraid to dance with us.
As we'd only had 1/2 an orange each for breakfast, we decided to go to the cultural cafe for a second breakfast. We ordered blue corn pancakes with breakfast potatoes, eggs, ham, and sopapilla with honey. We dripped honey all over everything trying to get as much honey as possible on our sopapillas. We like honey.
We drove through historic Albuquerque for a few minutes, and then got on the highway to high-tail it to Texas. We had about a 7 hour drive and it would be late when we got to Fort Stockton. Tricia had awoken about an hour before I had, and as we'd gone to sleep at 3 am, she was very tired and took a nap in the passenger seat while I drove through New Mexico rather on auto-pilot. When she woke up we chatted for a bit, and then she said, "um....did you get off at exit 316?" Um...no. And here we were at exit 370. I can't remember directions for more than 15 seconds after I'm told them, and I've been completely spoiled by the "stay on 80, stop when you hit San Francisco" directions we'd had up until then. So, we needed to figure out an alternate route. There was a diamond shaped group of roads to heading south, and that looked like the way to go. My gps said to take the east path, but it looked longer than the west path, so we headed west. For several miles, the gps implored us to turn around, but we ignored her. Right about then we also considered getting gas, but we had more than a quarter tank and gas was more expensive than it had been.
After a few miles, we came to the westmost corner of the diamond and began heading southeast. Suddenly, we were on the most empty, desolate road ever. There were no cars. There were no businesses, there were no houses. Every dozen miles or so we would pass the gate to a ranch, but the ranch itself was far enough away that we couldn't see any of the buildings. We had about 60 miles to go, and our gas was getting precariously low. And it was getting dark. In the waning light, we got out of the car to do some yoga. (Tricia made sure to lock the door, even though we'd seen about two cars in the past 20 minutes, and certainly no people. There had been some cows...) Then we got back in the car and pulled out the AAA guide. Apparently, AAA will drive to you and bring you enough gas to get you to the next gas station (I wondered if they'd really give us enough gas to go 40 or so miles). We foraged on, watching the gauge go all the way to the E. In the precious few moments that we had cell coverage, we tried to coax my cell phone and tricia's iPad into telling us where the nearest gas station was, but both just informed us that "our search returned no results on our route". When we finally got to the end of that road, the gas light came on, and there were still no gas stations in sight on the new road. But, there were cars. And cell coverage. And the iPad and cell phone finally stopped being so fatalistic and told us of gas stations 20 miles up ahead. We figured we had a good 30 miles left in the tank, so were feeling much more upbeat about the whole thing. (It's important to note here that only my phone and the iPad had very little coverage. Tricia, having Verizon, never lost coverage. Those Verizon/AT&T commercials are accurate - if you're in the middle of nowhere, you want Verizon, hands down.
After gassing up, we soon crossed into Texas. We had barely an hour left before we would reach Fort Stockton, and were in high spirits. Seeing several signs saying "turn left for historical marker", we turned left to find one of them. As we drove along the very dark back road, Tricia said it reminded her of the movie "the last house on the left", and then proceeded to describe it for me. If you havent seen it, I will tell you the plot. A girl is raped, and then her rapists are tortured by her parents. Except graphic. And gory. Whem she finished we snapped a picture of the road in front of us, made sure all the doors were locked, made a 3 point turn in the middle of the road, turned on Billy Joel, sang at the top of our lungs, and high tailed it out of there!! It was seriously spooky!!
We stayed on the main road for the remainder of the time into Fort Stockton. And we arrived safe and sound.
After a few miles, we came to the westmost corner of the diamond and began heading southeast. Suddenly, we were on the most empty, desolate road ever. There were no cars. There were no businesses, there were no houses. Every dozen miles or so we would pass the gate to a ranch, but the ranch itself was far enough away that we couldn't see any of the buildings. We had about 60 miles to go, and our gas was getting precariously low. And it was getting dark. In the waning light, we got out of the car to do some yoga. (Tricia made sure to lock the door, even though we'd seen about two cars in the past 20 minutes, and certainly no people. There had been some cows...) Then we got back in the car and pulled out the AAA guide. Apparently, AAA will drive to you and bring you enough gas to get you to the next gas station (I wondered if they'd really give us enough gas to go 40 or so miles). We foraged on, watching the gauge go all the way to the E. In the precious few moments that we had cell coverage, we tried to coax my cell phone and tricia's iPad into telling us where the nearest gas station was, but both just informed us that "our search returned no results on our route". When we finally got to the end of that road, the gas light came on, and there were still no gas stations in sight on the new road. But, there were cars. And cell coverage. And the iPad and cell phone finally stopped being so fatalistic and told us of gas stations 20 miles up ahead. We figured we had a good 30 miles left in the tank, so were feeling much more upbeat about the whole thing. (It's important to note here that only my phone and the iPad had very little coverage. Tricia, having Verizon, never lost coverage. Those Verizon/AT&T commercials are accurate - if you're in the middle of nowhere, you want Verizon, hands down.
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