The summer of 1999, I was working at New Mexico State University for my cousin, Ellis' stats guy. I was suppose to be helping him with some stats from an Entomology study, but he either didn't have the time or wasn't into working on it, so basically, I was paid to sit around and go to class once a week. Many weekends that summer were spent up at my cousin, Judy's house.One Sunday, Judy decides to take me down to Juarez since I had never been. After getting back across the border, we get to the car and start to leave town. Judy stops at a convenience store for us to go to the bathroom and get some snacks for the road. One thing we failed to get was gas. The stretch from El Paso to Alamogordo is very desolate. Judy was convinced that we had enough gas to make it, but that evening, we learned two things, don't go by the mileage estimate on a Cadillac and my ability to remember what the last mile marker we pasted. AAA sent people out with gas at least two times before they found us because we gave them the wrong mile marker.
Starting in 2002, Allen and I couldn't make a trip across New Mexico without something happening. When we were moving my things from Arkansas to Arizona, after the wedding, my air conditioner went out in my car in Oklahoma. Allen was driving his new F-150 that he had bought the day before in Paris. To his credit, he kept offering for me to drive it, but since I had never pulled a trailer, nor drove a vehicle larger than my first apartment, I stayed with my car. I was in tears driving west of Amarillo from the smell of the feedlots and being so hot. When we stopped for the night in Santa Rosa, our room had two full size beds. I was so hot and tired that I looked at Allen and said, "your sleeping in that bed, I'm sleeping in this bed."
The scariest trip occurred the same summer. Allen was working in Plano, TX, so we were driving from Tucson to Ruidoso to spend the night before driving on over to Texas. Around Deming, NM, we ended up in the worst dust storm I have ever been in. You could not see much past the hood of the car. Allen was having to follow the car in front because you couldn't see to pull over. We were in a rental car so we started to try to find the hazard lights to turn on. We looked everywhere on the steering wheel, but couldn't find it until we got out of the dust storm and found the big, red button on the dash. It wasn't until the next day that we found out right after we went through that area, there had been a ten car pile-up that closed I-10 down for four hours. We figured we caused it while looking for the hazard lights.
I won't embarrass Allen by telling the story of him and the lack of bathrooms between Carlsbad and El Paso, but needless to say, if you need to drive across New Mexico, make sure we are not with you.
From John and Judy's living room in Ruidoso, NM.
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