Paul and Corinne's Southwest Adventure

Campsite, Day One. This is not necessarily the most exciting picture with which to start the story, but this is how the story starts. Corinne and I set off from Santa Fe around noon and after a few uneventful hours arrived in Farmington, NM. We parked in this free community parking lot and spent the night on a futon in the back of the truck. Aside from some revellers leaving the bars early in the morning, our sleep was unperturbed. Farmington, at least to generalize from our 12-hour experience there, is a small mining and natural gas town with a very small western post-punk hippy contingent. If not for the three decades of tourists and art, Santa Fe wouldn't be much different. We found a nice microbrew restaurant that served steaks from locally raised cows and a coffee shop with an open mic night. We also found about two dozen payday loan places and more thrift stores per capita than we've seen in a while.