After a lazy morning in a Starbucks in Santa Fe, we continued on the road down to Las Cruces, stopping for Mexican food on the way.

We arrived in Las Cruces and found a stupidly cheap motel. It was now very hot and we went for a walk around the town. There were some rather questionable residential areas and large industrial areas as with many American towns.

The next morning we decided we would stay another night and headed to White Sands National Monument. This was a huge area of land in the middle of the desert where white gypsum sand had been blown inland and had stayed in massive dunes. For a few bucks you could go into the 'monument' and basically play in the sands, which many people seemed to be doing armed with BBQs, surf boards, sound systems and picnic tables.

It was extremely hot, but the sand was cold and lots of fun to slide and play in. There were also lots of trails you could take around the dunes, but it was just too hot to walk far.

The contrast of the bright white crystal sand against the bright blue sky was amazing, and the height of the dunes and the fun you can have running and rolling down them made it a very unique place, and unlike anywhere I'd ever been.

After a few hours of me basically acting like a ten year old and getting sand into places I didn't know it was possible to get sand in, we decided it might be fun to drive to Texas and the Mexican boarder.

The desert areas round there are home to lots of military bases and transmitter stations and lots of desolate lands and isolated towns. A few miles outside of Texas we were stopped by an imigration checkpoint to stop those pesky Mexicans (getting IN to Texas?).

We headed in to the Lone Star State and to El Paso and were met by a spaghetti junction of huge roads and flyovers and retail outlets and not much else rising from the scrubland. We finally found our way down to the boarder and masses of barbed wire, hovering helicopters and armed soldiers. We saw the boarder crossing and the road over to Mexico on the other side. But it was clear they really didn't want anyone who shouldn't be coming over the boarder in the states.

We headed back to Las Cruces after a drive round the back streets of El Paso and went to Mesilla - an old historic part of town with an old square and shops, bars and churches. It was very picturesque and welcoming, though now a little tourist-y. After that we had some more not-very-good Mexican food and back to our motel for beer and TV. But all I really cared about was breakfast at the traditional Pancake Alley diner opposite our motel the next morning...