Day three: Albuquerque

Morning is a mixed bag: the unwelcome aches concomitant with having slept on a piece of furniture not designed with a sound night of human sleep in mind and the barely restrained joy brought by the first shower in a couple of days. Quinn, in especially rough shape after pounding one last PBR before bed in a vain attempt to somehow overcome Nick’s snoring, takes the wheel and our group is off for Albuquerque’s The Tavern by 11:30.

I-25 leads through Denver, which is where Nick, wondering what he’ll have to offer a lonely trucker for a ride to Breckenridge, gets off the party train. Continuing south, our group speeds past Colorado Springs—pretty scenery, Air Force Academy, religious fundamentalists—Pueblo and Trinidad.

Quinn relieving himself in Nature:


As the mountains frame a brilliantly setting sun, the adobe tract houses of Santa Fe come and go, and the gray van of sonic glory begins its descent into Greater Albuquerque.

Miles of strip malls populated almost exclusively with chain stores give the area a depressing feeling of anywhere-anonymity. Arriving early to the barren parking lot of The Tavern—


—His Mis decides that dinner is in order. Steak in the Rough, with its signature deep-fried strips of steak, beckons, but abruptly closes after running out of meat.

Trying to figure out if deep-fried meat is a good idea:

Our group makes do instead with Lotaburger, sitting ‘round a cement table outside and watching a man repeatedly trying to mount, and then repeatedly dropping, his friend’s motorcycle in the bar parking lot next door. Discussion revolves around the frequency with which the city of Albuquerque appears in the show COPS.

Rock can happen even in an unspeakably lame bar:


Though the band plays a good set using borrowed mics—the bar’s microphones were stolen at some unspecified point in the not-too-distant past—and with Quinn’s eyes glued to one of the five flat-screen TVs in the room, the highlight of the night has to be Penthouse Photohunt.

From finding an extra palm frond in the background to noticing the presence of a third, Photoshopped-in breast, F, Q, & B rack up the points as they dominate the sexy videogame. By the time the two other bands—Animals in the Dark and Poor Man’s Ferrari—are finished and His Mis can mercifully depart the hellhole that is Albuquerque, they have ensured their lasting mark on New Mexico with a first-place finish at Penthouse Photohunt.

But wait! The awfulness of Albuquerque is not yet done with our heroes. Stopping for gas on the way out of town, they meet some more locals: a druggish couple at a gas station asking for money for meth…err, because they lost their car at “the checkpoint.” Lo and behold, minutes later, the gray van narrowly avoids said police checkpoint on the way to the highway. With no place else to go at 3 a.m., Fox pulls the van into an I-40 rest stop and the boys (with Miles in a sleeping bag on the roof) settle in for some sleep.

-Miles