I Love This Town

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Texas really isn't the most interesting place to travel through - nothing to look at the whole way apart from fields, fields and more fields. There were some truly awful people on our bus, as usual, including some woman who sent her kids up and down the bus begging for food. We finally arrived in El Paso for our stopover and I think it's fair to say it's the poorest looking city we've seen so far on our trip - the whole place is like one huge market stall with some fast food restaurants. Back on the bus and across the border to New Mexico where the scenery improved vastly and the sky was filled with more stars that we've ever seen - it was lovely. Got to Santa Fe at around 2.30am after 22 hours of travelling to find the bus station closed and no phones to call a cab! Luckily this local woman called one for us although we had to wait for an hour and listen to her talk about how she would like to execute people who gave bad customer service and how she once went on a date with Clint Eastwood....she was mad! She did tell us that it was fiesta weekend in Santa Fe which is apparently the biggest, and oldest, party on earth.

Well, she lied. We checked out the fiesta which was taking place in the main square in Santa Fe during the day and it was pretty quiet although all the shops and local businesses were shut so their employees could go to the party. We thought maybe it would be more lively at night - no, we were wrong. It took us about 5 minutes to check out the whole thing which consisted of some food stalls and a dodgy looking Spanish band singing tuneless songs. So we headed back to our hostel and wondered what the hell we were going to do for the rest our time here!

We gave downtown another chance and it does have some of the oldest buildings in America so we had a short wander around them. It's main attraction (for us, anyway!) was that it's main cathedral is featured in Twins when Arnold Swarzenegger and Danny DeVito are walking down the street in their new suits.

We also found out that the buses stop running at 7pm on weekend nights so there was not even the chance for us to escape out of town and even go to the cinema. Happy days. We managed to fill our time by beating some dumb Americans at Trivial Pursuit and drinking very cheap wine from the local supermarket. We did meet some nice people in the hostel though so one evening was spent chatting away to them - and one of them had a car which was very useful for the liquor store emergency run once our wine was all gone.

On our last night, which was a weekday, we could get the bus to the cinema (the only entertainment in town) and we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum which is very good and had lots of scenes set in and around Waterloo Station so it was nice to see a little glimpse of home and realise that some places do have life in them!

Finally it was time to be leaving and we're not sorry to be going. You could probably see all the sights here in about 24 hours and still have time to spare. Next stop is Flagstaff, Arizona which is only 2 hours drive from the Grand Canyon so we're looking forward to that! Apparently the town is nice and lively too - excellent!

PS - "I Love This Town" is a song by Bon Jovi who have massively sold out by singing it to promote some TV channel over here.

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