We drove into the night from Phoenix...

...and stopped at someplace in the middle of noplace. The hotel's quirky sign appealed to me. So did the railway yard right next door.

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Who could resist a hotel with not one, but three HBO's? I am guessing they meant "free HBO" but the sign-painter was not listening carefully. Or, perhaps they couldn't hear over the freight trains that came rocketing by, just across the street. I woke up several times that night thinking that something was going to come crashing through the building; it was very much the cheap motel experience. Most excellent!

Breakfast was large, held at a nearby greasy spoon. We took a detour to check out the "Shakespeare ghost town" which looked so uninteresting that we immediately turned around and aimed for White Sands, NM. Most of the way, we listened to Henry Rollins spoken word performances on the iPod. We got through Las Cruces, had our 4th amendment rights violated by the border patrol (who had no probable cause to stop or search our vehicle) and then up to White Sands. It was perfect weather for doing photography.

So, we did some.

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I was unable to resist the urge to shoot the usual 400 "pretty naked girl in sand at White Sands" photos. I think it's got to be some kind of rite of passage for a photographer. So I have loads and loads of those.

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Model prints in the sand. A good desert tracker can track a model - and tell her bra size - by the traces she leaves in the sand...

...But I wanted to do something a little bit different. Which is why I packed my old tux, and a beaded black dress that goes nicely with it. I set my camera up using DSLR Pro and we shot a few pictures of us doing a few tango steps.

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Considering it was so bright that I couldn't see my laptop display or my camera's LCD, the images came out well.

Another image idea I had - didn't work. In my gig bag, I have one of my cat-girl outfits. We were thinking it'd make a great LOLcat-girl shot to have Sarah dressed in catgirl looking at the dunes, with caption: "OMG big litterbox." But the cat-girl outfit I brought is white and blended too well with the sand. So we decided to shelve that idea.

After de-sanding ourselves, we hit the road to head toward Carlsbad. Sarah drove and I sat in the passenger seat drinking energy drinks and reading aloud from book one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. By the time we got to Artesia, NM, we were hungry and pulled up the list of restaurants on the GPS. Unfortunately, Artesia's restaurant scene has been devastated by the economic downturn and our choice was either fast food or diner food - and since the diner cheerfully announced "God loves you" I thought we should hie our atheistic, nihilistic selves thence. Mmmmmm... tacos and rootbeer. We ate under a sign that read "Grace isn't supposed to make life any easier."

Tomorrow, breakfast and a quick drive to Carlsbad caverns, to see stalagmites and stalactites and all that schist.


mjr.