(I wrote this part Monday, but couldn’t get on the internet to post it)
So much time and so little to say. Stop. Strike that. Reverse it.
I do not plan on going a week between posts, but the road trip just begun/started/began today.
Where is Matty B? Las Cruces, New Mexico!
Where has Matty B been all week (I know you’ve been wondering!)? New Braunfels, TX.
Let me bring you up to speed before I dive into the fact that Denver, Keith, and I are currently in the apartment of a true hippy/freespirit/chineselaternshanginginthelivingroom/icankeepgoing with whom we are staying (via couch surfing!) here in New Mexico.
Following the launch of this blog on that fateful Tuesday (six days ago), I re-lived one of my favorite college outings. I met James at the Ginger Man at 6pm. The Ginger Man might be the best bar in Dallas. Senior year in college we went for a beer every Thursdays for 45 consecutive Thursdays to have a fun tradition together. It is a poorly kept secret that every week on Tuesdays at 6pm a different brewery sponsors a mug give-away where if you order a specific beer you get to keep the mug with that brand’s logo on it. Well, this week was a chimay style beer that was 9% alcohol. James and I had planned on going to the indy movie theater to see Food Inc, but after our beer.. and then another, I saw the that signature James smile and we decided to go out for the evening. Where do you go after the G-Man? Idle Rich! Idle Rich pub is just down the street and awesome on weeknights (not on weekends, too crowded with the Dallas popped-collar crowd). We did this all the time in college. You can walk between the two, and after a few beers, heading to another bar always seems like a great decision; especially on a Tuesday. Morety, Fife, JRod, Piper, and Payton all met up with us and we enjoyed a “few” summer beers. Summer beer is an awesome/evil combination of vodka, blue moon, and lemonade. They taste wonderful and lead to more summer beers.
Wednesday I awoke with a headache, joked around with James and Morety for a bit and they headed out to work and I headed down to New Braunfels! New Braunfels is between Austin and San Antonio. It is really awesome river town where you can float the river or go to Gruene Hall. We shot soft pellet guns, hung out by the pool, and relaxed. It was a great way to go through institute detox. It’s Caitlin’s hometown and the jump-off point for the road trip. Denver and Keith came in later in the week and James came down too to celebrate Caitlin’s birthday. Friday night we had a party for Caitlin and her high school friends came over and we all shared stories from our classrooms. Cait was TFA NYC 07 and taught third grade in the Bronx, Keith taught/still teaches at Locke H.S. in the Watts section of LA (google it and read the crazy stories about the gang fights at his school AND the exciting new stuff going on now that greendot has taken over), and Denver is a journalist and is thinking about writing a piece on education. Anyway it was a fun night.
Saturday we decided to float the river. My friends Piper “Pipes” and Monaco came down to join us. They had partied it up at Texas State in San Marcos the night before and arrived around eleven in not the best shape. The boys had just bought camelbacks (the backpacks that you can put water… or other fluids into) and Pipes had been reading TuckerMax. They filled their camelbacks with beer Friday night and in their attempt to make Texas State fun, emptied them quickly. For our big river adventure they decided to fill the backpacks with Gatorade and vodka and Jack and Coke respectively. We all loaded up into the xterra and headed out. It was so nice out that all the tubing companies were booked for hours, but Caitlin had the hook-up and a friend loaned us some tubes and we parked and followed the crowds toward the river. The river was packed with people lounging in inner-tubes and drinking beers from coolers (think water park lazy river for big kids). We all relaxed and talked and drank. At different points on the river, you go through shoots that spit you out fast and we got separated from Monaco. I pulled myself up to the shore and started yelling out for him. His smile had been getting progressively bigger, his eyes progressively smaller, his camelback full of “haterade” or “faderade” progressively emptier. Yelling out caught the attention of everyone on the river and they started chanting “Take it off! Take it off!” Who was I to disappoint?! So I took off my shirt. Everyone cheered. Then I went back to finding Monaco. We found him soon after. He was happy as could be and had made lots of new friends showing off his camelback full of booze.
We got off the river after a few hours and waited by the exit for Pipes who had gotten separated towards the end of our float. After a while, Monaco went back down to look for him, but tossed his empty beer can back to us on the street corner before heading back to the shore. Well, the small river town police saw this and swooped in to issue him a littering ticket. Monaco (still wearing his camelback) talked to them for sometime and we were all worried things were going to fall apart so Denver (our sober driver for the day) walked over to claim him from the cops and make sure everything was okay. Two minutes later the hand-cuffs are slapped on Denver’s wrists and the day looks like it is taking a turn for the worse. Apparently Denver was talking back to the cops and they didn’t like it. After a while though he apologized and they let him go. We found Piper and retreated back to Caitlin’s house where everyone fell asleep in random places all over the house.
Sunday we chilled out, grilled at Caitlin’s dad’s place, and packed up the car for Monday.
Today we drove through West Texas. Have you ever been there? Don’t Bother. We drove and drove and drove. Stopped in Fort Hancock, Texas (Do you remember the name of the town? I wonder if the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. Name the movie), thought about stopping in El Paso (Bramlett told us not to bother and was right) and finally made it here to Las Cruces!
Las Cruces is a cool little hippy town in southern New Mexico home to NM State University. We e-mailed a bunch of people on the couch surfing website when we were back in Texas and this girl named Mick e-mailed us back and said to come on down. So that is where we are now, in her living room covered in quotes, postcards, colorful shawls, candles, and books about drugs… something she seems to like discussing a lot. We’re off to pick up another couch surfer (from France!) from the bus station then heading over her friend’s house.
More to come, but in honor of hanging out with hippies, I want to give a shout-out to Rich Meredith!
Trekking to Camp David
Where is Matty B? Prescott, Arizona!
It is now Wednesday afternoon and we’re in Arizona on our way to visit Denver’s uncle. Uncle David lives in a small cabin that he build himself in the middle of the desert. He has given us strict instructions to arrive with five 30 racks of Milwaukee’s Best and some brisket. I plan to post pictures.
Back to Las Cruces! So after picking up “Frenchie” whose real name was Sam, a couch surfer making his way from San Francisco to New Orleans we went over Mick’s friends’ house. Six of them lived in one house and apparently none of them had jobs. They were all really nice, a few of them were from Connecticut, and various other places in the west. We sat around on their porch and drank and talked about how they were planning on moving to Costa Rica to farm some new renewable bio-fuel… but were currently broke. It was fun and different for me, which is good and kind of the purpose of the trip to begin with. I had to share a futon with the frenchie, he smelled from traveling, this was not fun, but I was tired.
We got coffee with our new friends on Tuesday morning before we hit the road for Santa Fe! Santa Fe is very very cool (in terms of vibe and atmosphere and also in temperature as Las Cruces was really hot and Santa Fe had a cool mountain breeze). We broke our budget and got a great Mexican dinner at a restaurant called the Shed and then it started raining cats and dogs. We couldn’t score a place couch surfing and Katie Beth’s grandparents were out of town so we were out of luck. We toyed with staying at a hostel, but it was pricey so we headed south back towards Albuquerque. Denver just returned from a human rights research program in Poland in June and one of his best friends apparently grew up in Albuquerque. He called asking if we could crash at one of her friend’s places and ended up at her parents house. They were super nice and even cooked us breakfast this morning.
Side note: I thought I heard my phone ringing at 3am but was pretty asleep so I shrugged it off. This morning I had a funny voicemail from Espo (in her fake New Jersey accent) and the Hawaii crew (I could hear Carrie egging her on in the background). Drunk dials from Hawaii are extra funny because with the time change, they come in the middle of the night. ** I added this because of how red Espo’s face will get when she reads it.
Okay! So we’ve been driving ALL day through New Mexico and Arizona on country roads and it has been beautiful. We passed through the Zuni Reservation (where TFA New Mexico places) and have been rocking out with the windows down and the radio up and vice versa. Hope to be at Camp David (as we’ve been calling it) by sundown.
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