*WARNING*

Texas is HOT.

                                          Example:

That's the temperature gauge on my rental.  We didn't know it had the capacity for three digits!  Fascinating.

I believe I have already explained my strategy for avoiding bathroom breaks by simply avoiding liquids.  This has worked well, even all through the South!  However, the South has frequent rest stops, so if a person does choose to drink water, there's no worries.  Also, I never hit three-digit degree percentages in the South.

...and we keep climbing...

Apparently in Texas, if one is traveling towards New Mexico, things are pretty straight forward.  Literally, the road is completely straight.  Also, one gets no stops, unless traveling through a town with a gas station WITH a bathroom that is functional.  It's best to avoid liquids...or so I thought.  Might as well not eat either, since you aren't going to see any of that fast-food nonsense out here. 

So, I traveled very straightly through Texas for 5 hours, avoiding liquids and foods, really just taking pictures and admiring the view:

Ahh, the gorgeous and strange Southwest.  Wow, that gauge just keeps going up.  Well, New Mexico will surely be a little cooler.  Right?

Oh, but "it's a dry heat."

Let me tell you something about New Mexico, and about a "dry heat".  First of all, New Mexico is not cooler, it is even hotter, than Texas.

 

...and "DRY HEAT" is not an excuse, IT IS A WARNING.  What this means is:

If the HEAT doesn't kill you, the liquids rapidly draining from your lifeless body surely will.  I discovered this in the ten minutes it took to move my stuff out of the car into my hotel room in Roswell, which apparently did not have a working AC.  I think it also had smurfs and rainbows, but then again, that may have been the hallucinations.

One room change, a cold shower, two bottles of water, and a meal of packaged tuna, crackers, and soup later, and the moon stopped moving around in the sky like a UFO.  Hey, I'm in Roswell, you never know.

~A