Our second day is not our most exciting on this trip – for me it is just a way-station in a corporate hotel to let me get in a full day’s work, and the Prof agrees to take the boys out and about in town to get them out of my hair.
Our hotel room has two queen beds, a small bathroom, and a small table and chair. The narrow hallway leading from the door into the room is a galley kitchen, with a full sized fridge, single smooth top oven burner, sink and dishwasher, and I unpack our kitchen bag and cooler there – it already needs sorting through. Any time we are in the room, the boys put on a Netflix game show called “Floor is Lava.” We’ve never watched this before, and we have a lot of fun watching small groups of three – sometimes friends, sometimes coworkers, sometimes siblings or parents or other family combos – fling themselves uncomfortably around an obstacle course set up in a lake of red goop. We end up rooting for favorites, sometimes competitive with each other. I feel like the boys would do a decent job navigating without falling in the lava, except they would probably bicker too much!
We switch off the tv and walk downstairs for the hotel breakfast. The boys each make a giant Texas-shaped waffle – I select a couple hard boiled eggs and a yogurt.
Then I wave good-bye and off they go – the Prof takes them to the stockyards to watch a cattle drive, and then to tour the Water Gardens. He sends pictures at my request – Jack is wearing a hoodie in 105 degree heat, lord help us.
All three boys enjoy the 11:30 a.m. longhorn drive down East Exchange Avenue, and then do a timed maze in the cattle pens. When you pay for tickets, you get a long yellow card which you punch in and out into a timeclock, to time your speed. Then you run through the maze and find the letters M – A – Z – E. Each letter has a custom letter-shaped hole-punch hanging from a string, and you punch your card with each letter as you find it, then make your way back out to the timeclock and see how fast you did it.
The Prof texts me a picture from above of Craig running through the maze, and writes “can I just leave them here?” (TBH they might not have minded – sounds like they had fun!)
The water gardens are next – a lovely little area of water fountains and pools, which has been the site of a surprisingly large number of deaths (as I learn when I google the wikipedia page to write this entry). The boys leap around in the concrete steps and pillars just a few feet above the deadly waters below, completely unaware of its murderous history (and probably the better for it).
Meanwhile I knock out several productive hours, then around 1:30 I throw on some gym clothes and do a core workout in the hotel fitness center. While I’m down there, the boys come back and change for the pool, which is separated from the fitness center by a wall of glass. I wave, come out and say hi, then head up to get my laptop and my own swimsuit on, work by the pool an hour or so. Unfortunately, across the street is a very dusty, very active construction site, so it’s a bit loud, and it’s also windy. The umbrella is broken and wonky. But the kids are kids, they splash and have fun regardless of the quality of the pool, and I tap out emails and head into the empty quiet fitness center whenever I need to take a call.
About 3:00, they are hungry – turns out they never had lunch. We all trundle up the stairs and I make macaroni and cheese on the tiny stove, they eat in front of our new fave show, screaming exasperated instructions to the teams between bites. We have three $25 AMC gift cards burning a hole in our pocket (from certain little boys’ Easter baskets), and have already decided we will see the 7pm showing of Jurassic World at the cinema just down the street. But meantime in the afternoon, the Prof has a couple errands to run – last minute camp gear purchases for the backpacking. He heads out and the boys put on The Adam Project – a kinda trippy movie, but fun. They pull the blackout curtains closed, turn off all the lights, and I work in the dark by the glow of my laptop while they watch Movie No. 1 of the day. I have a pretty tense litigation call, and I take it in the bathroom – stick a small chair in there and frame my head within the door, so no one on the video call can tell what room I’m in. Gotta love remote work.
The Adam Project ends, the lights come up, the Prof returns. I ask the boys to tidy the room a bit before we go to the movie, and Jack ends up trying to fold one of my strappy sports bras and is absolutely befuddled by it – you had to be there, his genuine consternation and laughing at himself while he tried to untangle the straps was so funny.
Before heading to Movie No. 2 of the day, we grab In n Out burger for dinner. We suffer, many, M.A.N.Y. jokes about going in, and out, and in, and out. “Look mom, I’m in! Now I’m out! Haha, now [puts one foot on each side of the doorway] I’m in AND out!” With weak faked laughs, we shove them all the way IN and order.
The burgers are delicious – and halfway through the meal Jack figures out that he’s eaten half of the thin butcher paper his burger was wrapped in. “Eh, I couldn’t really taste it.” Hopefully it, uh, made it through him ok.
See the bite marks on the paper? Mmmmmm, paper.
We drive a couple miles away to the local AMC to watch Jurassic Park Dominion, which is fairly terrible and definitely way too long. We have fun, but phew they barely even TRIED with that script. Jeff Goldblum is the only bright spot.
Once home, Jack crawls into his sleeping bag on the floor, which he has chosen in favor of sharing a bed with any of his squirrelly, sprawl-limbed brothers.
I have nightmares all night about dinosaurs eating children. Next day is a pretty long drive to Taos, and we are up relatively early to get on the road. I get a jump on the morning, make three quick Texas waffles and bring them upstairs so the snoozy boys can roll out of bed and eat. Liam helps fill ice water in our cups, which I have decided will be his daily morning chore. They have already eaten almost all of the snacks I bought for the trip – pretzels, crackers, apples. I pack peanut butter sandwiches, goldfish, and grapes in lunchboxes for the four of them, and make myself cottage cheese and peaches. Then I empty the fridge, fill the cooler, and between the five of us we manage to shift everything back down into the car. We are back on the road, north to Taos, New Mexico.
The drive through Texas starts with sprawling suburban strip malls – 8 lane highways, eventually turning into wide open fields with massive, lazy wind turbines spinning, spinning. Slowly, as the miles go by, the landscape levels off and turns scrubbier. We climb and climb in elevation, and soon we are in a landscape where stark, steep-sided buttes rise up out of a flat desert landscape.
Multiple times I try and fail to point out dust devils to Liam, who misses them every time. We exclaim at the Welcome To New Mexico sign, keep driving under cotton candy white clouds, blue sky. It is a clear day.
We stop at Tucum Cari for gas – it looks just like the little town in the Cars movie. Dusty, somewhat abandoned, lots of old timey cars.
Eventually, we are climbing through the Sangre de Cristo mountains, piney green woods on all sides. The temperature is eminently reasonable, and we throw open the windows and wind along mountains roads, feeling at last like we are somewhere new and on vacation.
I promise very soon there will be pictures taken NOT through a bug-carcass-stained windshield.
We arrive in Taos around 6pm MST – our first time change of the trip! We unpack into our second floor room at the Hotel del San Fernando de Taos, relax for an hour or so, then drive around looking for a dinner place, but everything is shut! Taos is apparently not a late night party town – nor even a town where one can get dinner at a reasonable hour. After driving and being turned away from a handful of places, we finally find a chain bar and grill that is ten minutes from closing, and they let us in somewhat reluctantly. I order a magnificent tower of nachos which I cannot even get halfway through, and Moose Drool beer. Our food comes quickly, but they are stacking chairs on tables and flipping bar stools up on the bar already when we get our dinner, so we eat quickly and gulp our draft beers and head back to the room.
The boys watch a Despicable Me (not sure which one), while we lounge after a long tiring drive. We get a good night’s sleep this night, our windows flung open to let in the cool mountain air.
