This morning, we leave Sante Fe for Carlsbad, via Highway 285, but not after considerable dawdling.  Waking up late seemed to be the norm, as we continue to try to recover from weeks of exhaustion.  At 8:30, all of us finally opened our eyes with some kind of commitment to being awake and pondering thoughts of a day on the road.  The day is sunny and bright, but a winter storm warning hovers around us, with dark brooding clouds on the distant horizon promising some accuracy to the weather forecast; wise people would have moved faster, but we were doing a much better job at being lazy than wise.  After finally packing the car up, we (I to be exact) have a long ornery exchange with the desk manager over the bill, protesting the undisclosed $30 worth of fees that the manager couldn’t seem to understand were his problem, not ours. I had to go the final step and file a complaint with the national Super 8 office (trying to prevent the same unpleasantness from befalling other unsuspecting dog owners).  And so on and so forth, until it was 10:15 by the time we hit the road.  The dawdling continued, as we headed back into old town Sante Fe, rather than out to the Interstate.  First, we stopped at our friends, Peggy and Michael’s place to say goodbye ... a good plan indeed, because in addition to warm hugs, pleasant exchanges, and good travel advice, we also were blessed with a quart size bag of leftover Christmas ham, a treat that our made our eyes bug open after a week of almost exclusively vegetarian fare.  

 

A good dawdling would not be complete without a requisite stop at the Starbucks.  The Starbucks is a very cold walk from the nearest parking, as the storm starts to close in around us, the temperature plummeting with its arrival.  An extra hot mocha is an extra special indulgence on such a cold trek, in our heavily used, environmentally friendly personal cup, no less.  The Starbucks in Old Town Sante Fe was built in an old brick building:  expensive coffee mixed with old brick and alternative art were quite the combination.  

 

Surely, now we are done with dawdling, but ... not.  Yesterday, we spied a gallery of great appeal, but were shooed away by the mail truck honking its horn behind us.  Today, however, clutching extra hot Starbucks coffee in one hand and a string of chili peppers in the other, we stroll into the Sage Creek Gallery as if we had no travel itinerary whatsoever.  What a treat ... coffee and wonderful art ... one that we could afford to buy and one that we could certainly not.  

 

In the end, by noon, we are on the road, still slightly ahead of the slow moving storm, heading south on Highway 285 toward Roswell and Carlsbad.  Miles and miles and miles of arid desert landscape, sparsely populated, roll away before us.  We spend the afternoon in this landscape, uninterrupted except for an artistic cloud-and-sun debut to the west and the occasional train slowly catching up and passing us along tracks much straighter than our winding roads.  The alien faces carved into chain link fence and the UFO painted on the Walmart make our arrival in Roswell quite obvious.   We didn’t notice any spaceships filling up at the local gas station as we refueled and headed back out onto 285... it must be a holiday for them.

 

After a brief walk in a far-too-out-of-the-way State Park called Brantley Lake, we stop for the night in Carlsbad (anticipating the caverns just 20 miles down the road).  After discovering that we are to be blessed with a record 5 consecutive nights in non-Seedy hotels, we have a brief conversation about the money to be saved by lying (one person, one room would cost $35; we paid $61 for telling the truth about 2 dogs and 2 adults).  We decided what we usually do ... that falling in line with God’s will was likely a better plan overall than taking shortcuts along the way, although a detriment to the ever-stretched (but not quite over the edge) budget.