So I was dragging 80 pounds of clothing in a wheeled duffle bag across Albuquerque, New Mexico toward the ABQ Sunport and my flight to Montana that was scheduled to leave only 8 short hours later when all hell broke loose at the end of my toe.
Some of the city was pedestrian-friendly but the area around the University, it's athletic facilities, and the stadium home of the Albuquerque Isotopes baseball team is sidewalk-free. It was really lovely to see the sun set over the desert in July, but I would have rather seen it from a sidewalk than from the gutter on a divided highway flanked by flood-control ditches strewn with broken bottles and tattered Lobos pennants. The sidewalk would have really made my day. I took some pictures of the sunset from a rare strip of grass facing west and decided that this would be a good place to kill some of the hours that I had left between returning my rental car at 4pm on Saturday and my 6am Sunday flight to Montana. Reading, watching the sky change color. Then the automatic sprinklers turned on. Walking again. Good news! Sidewalks!
I stopped at a bus stop to eat some trail mix, read my book by the light of my headlamp and kill still more time. The sun is fully set now and it's full-on night. I considered curling up like a homeless guy in the bushes, but figured that all I needed was to get a fancy stab wound from the guy I was sure to displace in the vacant lot. On I walked. As is the case with many airports, the SunPort is located on the top of a rise outside of town. In NM, these rises are called mesas and they are big. I climbed, dragging my wheeled bag on the sidewalk toward the entrance sign of the airport, at which point the sidewalk ends and is replaced on both sides of the street by low-lying shrubs. I soldier on, casually brushing my Teva-shod feet through the edge of the shrubs as I head again for the gutter.
PAIN.
What the hell was that?
PAIN. STOP WALKING.
Holy crap my feet hurt. Look down. My feet are covered with Goatheads. Awesome. It took me almost 5 minutes to get them out of my skin and sandals. Best part is that they break up into smaller thorny sections when roughed up. Finish walking to the airport and spend a good hour repacking my bags, throwing junk away, cleaning up, and fixing my feet. Then I slept in the airport on one of the least comfortable chairs I have ever seen.
I woke up early and decided to survey the 150+ pictures that I had taken during my stay in New Mexico. Then I accidentally deleted all of them. Here's the one image that I have of New Mexico. It's the terminal in the airport that I boarded my flight to Montana. Nice tile. Really, I had fun, but I'm still smarting about deleting all the pictures and the goatheads. That was unreal. Ask me about it sometime, I'll tell you all about Valles Caldera Nat. Preserve, Bandelier Nat. Monument, herds of Elk, incredible scenery, Los Alamos, Sulfur Dam, thousands of feet of volcanic ash, tinder-dry forests with me in the center and lightning on it's way, Red Rocks, long hikes, cattle skeltons, serious ghost towns, Lead Street, ground squirrels, Chilili, Coal Avenue, adobe, Santa Fe, decorated highway overpasses, Route 66, free-range cattle, the Rio Grande, taxidermy studios 3 blocks from downtown ABQ, all of it. Just ask me.
Next time: more pictures of Montana... here's one to tide you over.
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