Well, I’ll start with the most recent things and work my way backward, ending on Friday, the 22nd of June…

On July 1st (when I’m writing this) we got up, ate breakfast at a really nice Wingate hotel that seemed to have just been opened (all the TVs were big-screen flat panel HDTVs) and started driving. Which we did for most of the day. We stopped at the gift shop for the world’s largest pecan grove (in New Mexico, no less!) and went to Subway at Wal-Mart for lunch in a town whose name starts with a D but I forget exactly what the full name is. I bought another cell phone (see my Go4Prepaid blog post…the camera phone was a mere $40!) and a cheap ($30) inverter for the car while I was there, the latter being for charging my and my brother’s laptops, plus whatever other phone chargers and such I have that don’t have (at least for me) a DC equivalent.

There was a LOT of driving time today. I whiled away the hours mainly by watching my brother play (on his laptop) or playing (on mine) either Motocross Madness, Mario Kart 64 or Super Smash Brothers (the latter two with an N64 emulator). But about two hours of my time was diverted to watching the first two episodes of the first season of 24…I didn’t have quite enough hotel time to finish downloading the third episode and all the rest of the season was only about 70% done. I gotta say, so far the show is interesting enough to put as my lone favorite typical TV show )need to update that). Can’t wait to finish watching the season…at least thusfar.

The day was wound up somewhat when our heavily loaded van registered high engine temperatures after chugging up scrubby, lonely mountain byways toward Gila National Forest’s actual forested area. We turned around and safely coasted down the hill, aided by our van’s AutoStick feature…probably the only thing my dad will miss when the family upgrades in eventuality to a Japanese-made car (then again they might have it too). As we came down the hill we spotted a forest fire, caused by lightning from recent storms…we weren’t the first ones to see it and it was a ways away so there was no need to report it. We ended up watching…at an unprecedented-ly close distance…a very good fireworks display put on my the local community…I have some nice pictures and an okay movie, thanks to my new camera’s Fireworks mode. One of the pictures is now my desktop photo, changed thereto when I hooked my laptop up to true AC power at the little cabin where I’m typing this post. No internet here of any sort…dialup is probably long distance no matter what and there’s no Ethernet or WiFi, hence this post not being in realtime. But at least the room is as good as an average hotel room, plus kitchen, sans freezing-cold AC.

Well, got to turn in now. More on my former adventures later…