We left Santa Fe, with me feeling like I'd been kicked in the stomach thanks to whatever had been wrong with me the day before, but eager to get closer to Texas, where it might actually be a bit warmer! In our heads we were aiming to get to a place called Las Cruces and so now realising that not every town cleared out their motels especially for our visits, I phoned ahead...only to discover that Las Cruces was also a bustling metropolis and all their rooms were booked as well. Studying our well thumbed road map, we settled on a place called Alamogordo about another 80 miles on, where they had plenty of space. This meant that we would be close enough to White Sands National Park to go and visit it in the morning and could call in at a place on the way that I had added to my wishlist, purely for its name...Truth or Consequences! I had assumed that the place was some sort of Mormon settlement (or maybe Catholic? I'm not that great with my strict religions.) The truth was altogether more interesting though! Some time back in the 1950s a radio station had held a competition for its listeners...the prize being that they would hold the final episode of one of their most popular shows in the winner's hometown...In order to win the competition the winner simply had to convince their fellow residents of said hometown to change the town's name to 'Truth or Consequences', named after the show. So Hot Springs, New Mexico became Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. How ridiculous?! Anyway, I was expecting something relatively interesting out of the place purely because its residents or at least their grandparents must have been nuts! Unfortunately we came off the interstate and got caught up in some sort of road system that took us straight out of the place. Not that it really mattered, as there appeared to be the sum total of nothing going on there...even the visitor centre was closed. We ended up having to settle for a postcard from a petrol station, where the attendant was having a bit of an epi, as they'd run out of petrol, and the tanker to bring the new stuff was 4 hours late. I tell you what, we get caught up in all the drama!

So we left the town that the Rough Guide accuses of "prostituting itself" very shortly after we'd arrived (trying not to think about how many miles detour we'd had to take for the opportunity to say we'd been there) and headed to the bright lights of Alamogordo. Knackered, we knew that it was going to be another quiet night, and so went out to find somewhere to eat. Alamogordo might have b*gger all else, but it does have hundreds of chain restaurants...we plumped for Pizza Hut...at least we knew what we were getting! This particular branch was advertising its brand new 'Sicilian Lasagne Pizza' - it's like every so often they needed to remind us that we were in America, the fattest nation on earth! I somehow doubt that they're going to be introducing this topping at home any time soon! The staff at this particular Pizza Hut had to be seen to be believed...they made the ones in Newport seem like they'd been trained to work in Gordon Ramsey's restaurant or something. In fact I'm fairly sure that they made our stuff, packed it all up to be delivered to someone's home and then realised it was ours (before or after it had taken a trip on the motorcycle we couldn't tell), so that my Pasta Primavera was served in a foil flan case. Haute cuisine at its best! And the table vibrated continually and no one could tell us why. Odd. We headed back to our motel room as soon as possible only to discover that a cockroach had moved in in our absence. Emily dispensed of it and we had another early night. Couldn't be bothered to haul our rucksacks down to the reception to ask for a new room, and frankly there was no guarantee that every room didn't have a resident roach!

The following morning we got up to go to the White Sands National Park, which looks absolutely amazing in all the photos I'd seen. It is made up of massive sand dunes of this white gypsum stuff, like sand only finer I guess. You're allowed to wander all over them and toboggan down them as the winds reset them into different formations every time it blows anyway. We drove to the kiosk to pay the little man for entry, where he announced to us that there was no fee for us because we were very pretty ladies. He was a very odd man, but not ones to look a gifthorse in the mouth, we drove on in and headed for the gift shop to purchase the necessary souvenirs. Is it odd that I buy the souvenirs before seeing what we come to see?? Anyway, it was at that point that we discovered that the 8 mile self guided drive was shut off after 4 miles because of the weather conditions (as I remember it, it was sunny that day, but maybe that's a problem...) So we drove the 4 miles, which were very pretty, but not as great as the photos had made out, as they had been taken much further into the park. It was a great shame, but it was another tick in the tourist boxes, so to speak. After washing our car (ourselves! It had reached the embarrassing stage again) we drove to Roswell, home of all things alien...x