Day 1

The plans came out of the blue. Earlier the plan was to go to Corpus Christie Bay in southern Texas coast which was a one day affair. But then plans changed and so did the players and finally, merely 12 hours before the start of the trip, it was decided that we are going to Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Roswell.
We here are:
1) Myself
2) Roomie Nikhil
3) Host n Friend Parag
4) Host And friend Dhananjay urf D
5) Harsha
6) Mugdha
7) Chetan (Friend of D)

Two cars were booked. I am no car fanatic so I have no interest in the models though I was frequently asked but all I know that both were Dodge Cars.

28th Dec, Wednesday

We planned to start off at 6:30 but finally started by 8:50 am. I was with D and chetan. As soon as I sat in the car and it started, I felt the most dreaded motion sickness. But I was ready and promptly took an avomine which made me sleep like a log for sometime. Later when I analysed, I think it was because of the initial phase and the sharp turns inside the city. This is the route we took. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=college+Station&daddr=Santa+fe,nm&btnG=Search
After a small break for brunch at a place out of waco, which I don’t remember coz I was almost at sleep we resumed our journey again. We had subway footlong. Can’t tell you anything about the road as I was too sleepy till this time. Now, me and Nikhil were there in the car which chetan was driving and as everybody around we also crossed the speed limit and it was our car only which was spotted by the cop and we were fined for around $160 in the very first phase of our journey. But I think in a sense it was good, coz after that none of us oversped inspite of all the cars and even heavy trucks overtaking us.
We touched interstate highway I-40 (Chicago-LA) at a place called Amarillo. It was an awesome highway where we learnt about what are exits and business exits and loads of other things about the highway. Around twilight, we were behind the schedule by around an hour when we entered the state of New Mexico. There was a board to welcome us and told us to change the time. We had entered Mountain Time zone and gained one hour. But somehow I was arrogant enough not to change it. Around 40 miles fro I-40 is the capital of new mexico: Santa Fe. We reached there at around 10 pm. It looked like an average size city in the night and the glittering lights from hilltop looked real good. We started looking for motels on the main road of santa fe. Let me tell you I am very poor at finding hotels because the hotel I had ditched as would be sureshot costly turned out to be the cheapest. The Park Inn. All restaurants were closed and we did the funny act of walking thru a drive thru of taco bell (Mexican style restaurant). I had one “chicken chalupa” as I was not much hungry and we were off to sleep.