Our arrival into New Mexico was definitely memorable. First of all, the landscape was so foreign to everything we had seen on the road trip thus far: rolling hills and mountains of desert, sage bush in every direction you looked(Tina and I argued about this....Tina was convinced it wasn't sage...but as we discovered later...it was) and no sign of people or wildlife anywhere. It was all very impressive. That night we take a road off the highway in the middle of nowhere. The place that we found ourselves isn't even on the map...but it's in Honeyville near Tremonton, NM. We're definitely a few miles (ahh look at me...I've been in the U.S too long, I'm already starting to use miles instead of kilometers!) off the highway and we're just looking for a decent place to put up the tent. Next turn...STUCK IN THE MUD. For the next hour Tina and I laboriously attempted to get the car out of the mud...to no avail. I was pushing (you can still see two hand prints of mud on the back of the car) while Tina tried to drive out of the mud. Surrounded in sage bush, there was no denying it now on Tina's part, we start ripping apart the sage to try and put under the wheel...to create some sort of traction...and still no luck. So we find some wood, take the newspaper that we had in the car (from "top of the hour" news) and try that...still no success. At this point we're covered in mud, lost the flashlight and the car is still not moving, so we decide "screw this" and we camp in front of the car, stuck in the mud. The next day while I'm still sleeping, Tina's off and she finds three guys (they look like a Mexican, a Texan, and some other random, questionable man) in a HUGE semi-truck, going up to the middle of nowhere to work on the oil pipeline (that is where we had found ourselves...in oil country), so they come and pull us out of the mud!

Us and the filthy car attracted some interesting looks...and the car remains filthy to this day. Later we ended up going to a rest stop by a river and taking some good hippie baths.

Then we continued to Albuquerque to visit with Roxy and Phil, who are a very fun couple and longtime friends of Tina's. We stayed there two nights: Tina and I had a slumber party on the trampoline the first night (in a crazy wind storm that I feared would lift us off the trampoline). The next night we had dinner with Tina's ant and uncle and after Tina and Roxy got tattoos: two nice big red Zia symbols (symbol that represents New Mexico) right smack in the middle of the back, between the shoulder blades. We all had fun hanging out with the tattoo artist until the late hours of the night while he worked diligently on Tina and Roxy's tattoos.

Went back to Roxy and Phil's and I just went back to the trampoline and passed out, while Tina and Roxy got all the concoctions and ingredients for the maintenance of their tattoos.