May 26, 2001
After the wildlife exposition, we stopped at Hooter's in El Paso (no pictures
there, sorry) for more wildlife. Wow - their food really sucks!
After 9 plus hours in the saddle, neither Garrett nor I felt much like chatting
with the ass peeking out of pantyhose that came over to take our order.
We did quaff a couple of gallons of soda - quickly sweat out - and some
impressive Hot Wings. Impressive in that they tasted like housecat dipped
in bread and then fried. On the other hand, a good housecat can be very
tasty. Here Garrett is at the Texas / New Mexico border - the trip
actually starts . . . . now.
Las Cruces New Mexico is a quaint little town about an hour or so past El Paso, Texas (a quaint little dump on the Rio Grande). One of the fun things about getting to Las Cruces is riding with an open face helmet in 105 degree heat with the smell of pig farms for 20 or so minutes. Once we past the smell however, we found Las Cruces to be a cute, if boring, little town.
Here
we are, basically catching a picture outside someone's house. By this time
we had checked in to our hotel and taken a shower (separately, thanks for
asking). We changed clothes and headed out to the city to see what kind of
trouble we could find. We found a disappointingly low amount of readily
available trouble - so we headed to the tourist spots. We toodled through
the historic plaza for a bit, had this picture taken, then headed over for some
of the "best Mexican food in Las Cruces."
They say that to extract information from a prisoner,
interrogators will sometimes deprive the suspect sufficient food and water. In
addition to food and water, sleep deprivation and heat exhaustion can be very
effective as well I am told. I can not attest to this, but I can tell
you
that by the time we got to our dinner we were exhausted, dehydrated, running on
two hours of sleep and had already started living on beef jerky and soda.
We were wired, tired, and fried. Garrett made some joke, and I started
laughing so hard I had to lay down on the sidewalk to catch my breath - in
hindsight we were probably the most amusing show in town that night. This
picture was taken by a disoriented waiter trying to figure out what the hell was
actually going on. After dinner we cruised Las Cruces looking for
"entertainment." Much to our dismay, there wasn't much entertainment
without driving an hour back to El Paso. We opted instead to crash out in
our hotel room.
Here is a picture of Garrett, doing what he seemed to enjoy the
most of the vacation - sleeping. Once he found a bed to sleep on, he was
out. I tried just about everything I could think of to wake him up - he is
the master of passive resistance, in this case very, very passive. Keep
this picture in your short term memory, you'll be seeing it again.
In all fairness to Garrett - I did wake up at 4am every morning to start our
ride. I am very glad my brother doesn't sleep with a firearm - else his
resistance would probably have been more active than passive.