Follow Our Progress

April 25th 2004

We had intended to work on the bus a bit more, but we had a lot planned and the weather has not been all that cooperative lately.  The wind has been pretty gusty at times and has kept us from the painting project.  That and we had Emily's birthday to celebrate and a weekend trip to New Mexico to go exploring...

	Emily's birthday was a lot of fun.  We let her pick out the party supplies (balloons, plates, cups, cake and ice cream) She ended up with quite a few cool presents and seemed to have a very good time even though it was just the 4 of us in the bus celebrating. One of the problems I see with living and traveling around in the bus is that the girls don't really get a chance to make a lot of friends...  Erika has a small group of friends at school, but Emily is pretty much left out.  Becky has been taking her to the library on Wednesdays in hope's of finding her someone her age at the reading hour, but so far the rest of the group has been quite a bit younger than her. I think the birthday made her feel a bit more important to the family.  She was the star of the day for sure!
	We took a trip to New Mexico in the Jeep to check out the Las Cruces area.  We stopped at one of the rest areas and stretched a bit...
	Gas prices in New Mexico we're 35-40 cents cheaper than the lowest priced gas we could find in Arizona.  I can only imagine what the prices in California are right about now...  On the flip side, I think they had about the highest sales tax rate that I have ever seen...

Las Cruces was a real disappointment.  I'm not sure how to describe it without being rude.  It was not at all what we had expected.  The south of the city reminded me of the Oakland area.  Lots of gang looking crap going on and everything looked run down.  The north end of the city was pretty nice, but looked too "yuppy" and expensive for our taste...   All in all it was a wasted visit and a real disappointment.  To make matters worse, our hotel (The Teakwood Inn) was on the south end of town, so we were treated to a lot of loud music, revving engines, car alarms & pot smoke during the entire evening.  At one point the police came and checked in on a couple of the hotel guests next door.  No arrests were made, but we were treated to a lound ranting play by play description from one of the "suspects" outside our hotel room sliding door...  If you ever visit Las Cruces, don't stay at the Teakwood Inn and Suites - the place is a total dump.

The town of Old Mesilla to the southwest looked kind of interesting, but we found it difficult to navigate the single lane streets and after taking a look at the perimeter and all of the tourist traffic congestion, we decided that it just wasn't worth the time and effort and headed north...  To make a long story short, our entire trip was a bit of a disappointment.  I know that it's not fair to judge an entire state on such a small sample, but so far I really dislike New Mexico.