Good luck and bad luck

Saturday, October 26th.

While we were at the campground north of Albuquerque a few days ago we'd took advantage of the internet hookup and did a quick internet search for pawn shops and thrift stores in Albuquerque. We connected the dots on our map and this morning we set out on our trademark alternate shopping tour of the city. We actually only found very few of the adresses we had gotten off the internet, but found lots of other places along the way instead. We didn't get more than half a mile down the road before we got sidetracked by the first "Yard Sale" sign. The yard sale turned out to be pretty small but nonetheless yielded both a cd, two cookbooks and the sheetmusic from Stallone's "Rocky" :)

Further down the road we found two thrift stores across the street from each other. One was a small church-run shop that was having a 50%-off sale which meant that Dan succeeded in buying: three shirts, a purple jumpsuit (don't ask why; it was just irrestistibly cool), a mailbox (again, don't ask...) and a Calvin & Hobbes comic book -- all for $5! We continued the tour of thrift and pawn shops but restrained ourselves and didn't buy too much (by our standards, anyway...). The last store we stopped at was another small church-run thrift shop where we each got what we thought was quite a cool nylon winter jacket. After stopping for Mexican food down the street (at 4 o'clock we finally decided to start thinking about lunch) we headed towards the outskirts of town. While Dan took a quick tour of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center Jens set about rearranging his stuff in the van. Both things completed, we were ready to hit the road again and did just that.

We took I-40 towards Arizona and passed through an amazing variation of scenery and weather on our way west from Albuquerque. On the first strech through the desert we raced a mile-long freight train for a while, watching its orange and white boxcars reflect the rays of the afternoon sun. While the sun continued to shine on our left dark clouds were amassing over the mountains on our right. Suddenly fierce bolts of lightning shot out of the sky towards the mountains while the sun continued to shine calmly to the other side. Quite surrealistic. Not long after that a hailstorm all of a sudden unleashed its full power on us, making driving hazardous and causing an accident about a mile ahead of us that slowed down traffic for a while.

After darkness had fallen we stopped somewhere along the interstate at a truckstop to grab a bite to eat and to look for a payphone with an extra line-in that we could use to hook up to the internet. We found just that, and were able to get and send email from there. Our luck ran out there, though; while we were standing at the payphone we all of a sudden realized that we had -- by some stroke of amazing stupidity -- actually managed to lock both our keys in the van!

Exactly; we couldn't believe it either. Nonetheless, it was true. By an equally amazing stroke of luck, though, we discovered that we had forgotten to close the two rear windows entirely after opening them earlier. They can only be propped open about an inch or two but while Jens twisted the window outwards on one side Dan was able to squeeze his arm in and open the door from the inside, scale the piles and piles of stuff in the back of the van and open the front doors from the inside. As long as your luck matches your stupidity you can never go wrong... :)

We drove on into the night and ended up spending the night in the parking lot of a truckstop restaurant somewhere across the border in Arizona.