somewhere between nm and az

We're on the road now from Las Cruces, NM to Phoenix, AZ and I'm listening to Tori Amos' "Scarlet's Walk" album, which happens to be about as good of a road trip album as you'll find. If you have any desire to get a taste of what I'm experiencing, go find the album version of "A Sorta Fairytale". Staring out the van windows I can see for what seems like miles as houses are dwarfed by the mountains behind them. I'm finally starting to see what appear to be palm trees and cacti. Last night's show in Las Cruces was a lot of fun. We played what I think is our only house show on the tour and while attendance wasn't high, the vibe was pretty fantastic. The house was on a pretty sizable piece of land that contained trees of fig, pecan and pomegranate. Sean tells me the figs are quite tasty, but I have yet to partake of any of the picked fruit. Unfortunately the pomegranates were about a month away from being ready for picking. The house itself was large and had an uninhabited feel to it, I don't know about anyone else, but I would have loved to have hidden away there, away from the world for a few days. Our Solar System, who we played with apparently ran into some sort of monsoon weather on their way, so they were a couple of hours late, but the wait was well worth it. They played a really laid back set of nicely crafted pop music, as well as telling a few stories and reading a Mad-Lib they'd done on their journey to the show about bears... the band? Perhaps the animal. Either way it seemed appropriate. We'll see if we run into the overwhelming rain conditions in Arizona that they experienced yesterday. After the show we were lucky enough to find a place to crash and as an added bonus there was a shower that I wasn't afraid to use. Our hosts Jacinto and Mantissa let us take over the bedroom and Mantissa even made us pancakes for breakfast with our choice of bananas, walnuts and blueberries.

-jared

ps: as a side note, we learned as we were leaving that our charming host was an extra in the Transformers movie. How cool is that?