The 18 hour bus journey to Albuquerque will haunt us forever, much like the smell of our broken freezer (how do you like your fish fingers sir, rotten to their stinking core?).

It doesn't take much to please us these days - Trudy was happy that our room had an actual door rather than a curtain, and Tom was especially thrilled to spend 3 hours in the launderette across the road from our hostel and spent the next 4 days trying to invent reasons as to why more washing was required.

Albuquerque is not the biggest or the most exciting city we've visited in USA but this suited us perfectly as it gave us a respite from the evils of the drink. We celebrated drying out in the New Mexico desert (great pun!) by day-tripping to the moutains to the East of Albuquerque where we had an absolutely incredible view over the whole of the Rio Grande valley from the top of some weird rock formation which rose out of the ground about 50 feet (how convenient, we thought). We also visited the Petroglyph National Monument, a desert valley covered in black rocks (Trudy believed these to be igneous thanks to her GCSE science) which ancient people used for depicting various aspects of their lives through rock carving. Some of the carvings were also slightly more modern, the sort one might see on the back of a toilet door perhaps, or on the side of a disused railway line...

As we were going into the Petroglyph Visitor Center Trudy spotted a real life Roadrunner (Trudy's fear of birds seems to be dissipating by the way), but by the time Tom had ambled over with the camera it had run away...not on the road though (another great pun!).

We left Albuquerque without Alex, who decided to visit Santa Fe with Hoi-Ling (the girl who tried to make mashed potato by boiling a whole potato, skin and all, in an inch of water for an hour...). Needless to say, we assume that Alex will be taking on all cooking duties!