On the road again

After a restful Thanksgiving and "Black Friday" (someone needs to explain that one to me) at the Grand Canyon, I got back in the car and drove to Austin. It's a two-day drive, and I mapped it out beforehand--something I almost never do now because of Sibyl--so that I'd go through Albuquerque and Roswell and end up in Carlsbad, NM. Turns out Sibyl has a very jealous personality. When I went my way instead of hers, she completely flipped out. We got into a huge fight....I told her to recalculate, she insisted with all the urgency her monotone can muster that when possible, I should to make a U-turn. It escalated from there, and I think we both said a few things we didn't mean. Things are ok now. I don't know if they'll ever be the same, but I like to think that fight brought us closer together.

Anyway, on Saturday, I drove through New Mexico listening to the Notre Dame-Stanford game on AM radio when possible, and trying to find the Notre Dame-Stanford game on the radio when I couldn't hear it. The result was a rather eerie drive, with these weird AM reception noises coming out of my radio as I drove through a totally flat, empty landscape. The reception seemed completely arbitrary, and often I'd hear the first half of a sentence, and then the second half was just static. Hence when I got to the hotel that night, I thought the amazing lateral passing play had resulted in a touchdown, blissfully unaware of the ensuing controversial penalty. Bummer. But we won, and let's face it, ND needed that win over Stanford this season.

In any case, the landscape was beautiful, ranging from the rockfaces of the Painted Desert area to a completely flat farm/desert terrain covered in a green brush. Well, I don't actually know if it was desert or what was really going on under that brush because from Albuquerque on, everything was covered in about 3 inches of snow, which is normal in the city and surrounding area due to the altitude, but definitely atypical in southern New Mexico. I stayed over at a hotel in Carlsbad, and the next morning, my car was covered in another 2 inches of what would be known in the Midwest as really good packing snow. Fortunately, I've got the world's greatest snow brush and the mini-shovel I "borrowed" from my Uncle Russ last year, so cleaning off the car was no sweat. I noticed a few cowboys brushing off their pick-up trucks with their bare hands giving me the jealous eye, but no self-respecting cowboy asks a little lady for help getting the snow off his truck in a Holiday Inn Express parking lot. So I just got in my car and headed off into the sunrise.