Albuquerque or Albu-quirky?

Well I will be the first to say neither one of us minded leaving Texas behind, endless farm land, cows, skunks and dry counties is not what this road trip is about. But finally we made it to New Mexico, spent our first night at Lake Sumner State Park, we decided to go to Fort Sumner to visit the grave of none other than the infamous "Billy the Kid". Come to find out Fort Sumner and some place in Texas called Hico are in a dispute of who really holds the bones of "Billy the Kid", it seems if you believe the story where Pat Garrett let Billy escape and that he died peaceful as an old man, then you need to visit Hico to see the grave, but us being believers that Garrett killed Billy that dreadful night felt satisfied that we had saw the "real" grave. Here's a couple pics...

Billies tombstone has been stolen several times, but they finally locked it up

A river in New Mexico

Tinas view of New Mexico

Made a stop in Albuquerque on the way through, actually did a little detour down Central Avenue, which is the heart of Historic Route 66, and even had lunch at the "Route 66" diner. Maybe its just the people that hang out on Central Avenue but didn't take us long to realize we didn't fit in real well in Albuquerque, not enough piercings in our face and we don't even have a single tattoo between the two of us(which would have been easily solved on Central Avenue), but we are driving a VW Bus so maybe they thought we're the strange ones.

Route 66

New Mexico had some very beautiful places, and some very high elevations that we had to cross, its the first real test that "Charlie" has had to face, being from Florida (aka "Flatistan", as its known in the motorcycle world), I was wondering how he would do on the mountains that we would be facing being I had no way of testing him on hills. As everyone who drives a VW Bus knows they are no speed machine and are notorious for going especially slow up hills, well no difference for Charlie, if you want to find us just look in the slow lane going about 40 mph in 3rd gear, cause thats where we seem to spend most of our time on inclines, and as the elevation goes up, our speed goes down even more. But a little help from some octane booster ( 91 octane is the highest they have out here) Charlie pushed along just fine, hes like the little Westi that could, slow but steady.

Tina and Charlie after climbing a huge hill

Spent our second and last night in Gallup, N.M., which is on the border of Arizona. Its a very "Native American" city, everything is aimed towards visitors spending their money on Native American "goods". You even get bombarded by solicitors trying to sell you junk why your sitting in a restuarant eating your dinner. After over 1800 miles and 5 days we are excited to get to Arizona, mainly because we can slow down and take it easy, there is not alot that we want to see before we get to the Grand Canyon so we have just been driving like mad to get there as quickly as possible, and we are both ready for a day off. Driving a bus in the kind of wind that kicks up out west is pretty exhausting in itself, I got as much play out of the steering as I could before we left but in a 32 year old vehicle its nearly impossible to make the steering tight, there is only about two inches of play in the wheel but when your constantly turning from the left to the right with every wind gust that two inches adds up fast. Next up... Arizona.

A beautiful picture of N.M.