08/08/01 Santa Fe (NM) – Grants (NM) / 326 km

We were quite tired and we did not have much clean clothes so we decided to do the washing and to set off a little bit later.

We headed towards Alburquerque and as soon as we set off, a pick-up that was full of furniture overtook us. It dropped a chair that stayed in the middle of the road. Very dangerous ! We went on very carefully and we found and old road that lead to Albuquerque, a town that we did not like as much as we expected. We went out of town via the old road that makes a big detour before taking the west direction again, but the landscape was nice and we enjoyed the road. We saw some ugly clouds before us. Would we get wet again? Yes and no. We were in the middle of the road when the rain started, but we could see the clean sky ahead, so we accelerated to reach the end of the storms, while the wind played with us and put us in a jam. When we stopped, we realized that only the left side of our body was wet whereas the right side was dry. We do not know if it was because we were at the edge of the storm or it was due to the wind.

Later on we entered Indian territory, the reservation called Navajo Nation. In the way to our destination we entered an Indian village and according to the little we saw we can say that they not have a very good standard of living; the village was basically a bunch of shacks and the conditions were quite poor. It started to rain again and we stopped in front of the trading Post in “Villa de Cubero”. Some years ago these businesses were the main supply providers for all travellers. Nowadays, they are like the grocery store of the neighbourhood. When we resumed the journey we saw there were works in the road, so we took the motorway for some kilometres. We saw a huge casino and we remembered that in Indian territories casinos are legal, and in fact they are one of the most important income generators in the community.

Due to the intermittent and very annoying rain, for the first time we decided to stop before the planned destination for the day, and we stayed in Grants. Once there, following the usual methodology, Josune chose a hotel relying on its external looks. This time she chose the "Franciscan Lodge". The manager of the place was an Indian and he treated us very well. He looked at the motorbike completely fascinated and he made a lot of questions, as a small kid do. He had a cat called “Angel" that followed him everywhere like a dog. The most surprising thing is that the cat would obey him! Josune was upset because he was calling the cat “honey” all the time (nothing to be upset about) but because he would call his wife “honey” as well.

We had dinner in a small restaurant called "El jardín". As we speak Basque between each other, a woman sitting in a table next to us could not help asking us what language were we speaking, since she was not able to identify it. We told her it was Euskera, and she was very surprised and made us a lot of questions about it. When we arrived to the hotel, we put the weather channel and we saw the rain was going continue the next day, so we decided to get up early since the preliminaries for a rainy day are quite long…