Road trip to Alamogordo!

Today, I get to start the details behind the road trip Abed and I took in the summer of 1994. I alluded to this in my last two posts.

I had recently gotten in contact with a friend of mine from college who had been making headway as an entertainer in Mexico. Her name was Cid and she'd actually recorded and released a CD with a major record label there. She and her significant other/collaborator were living in Santa Fe at the time. I had sent her cassettes featuring music by Abed and me. She said she liked the material very much and wanted to meet Abed. They also had a recording studio set up in their garage and invited us to record a song there. We had a piece we had been working on together called "Welcome to Paradise." The only problem was that I couldn't put the track in my sequencer because it was already full with the music for my Mom's wedding, so I would have to wait until afterward to get the track ready but before we got to Santa Fe.

The plan for the road trip was that we would drive to Alamogordo and I would drop him off at his sister's house. He would stay with his mother in Tularosa. I would come pick him up and we would go to Santa Fe.

We left on Wednesday the 20th. We were supposed to leave San Diego at 2pm. I don't remember what transpired. I think that Abed had a bunch of loose ends that he needed to tie up before leaving and we didn't hit the road until 8pm! I needed to be in Artesia by 6pm the next night so that I could attend the rehearsal for my Mom's wedding and I had hoped that I would get there a few hours early so that I could hang out. In order for that to happen now, I was going to have to stay awake and drive all night long.

I thought I could manage it, but along the way, we came to an accident scene. I was a little slow to respond to what was in the road ahead of me, so I had to slam on the brakes to keep from causing another accident. Soon after I came to a stop, a highway patrol officer came up to my window and gave me a lecture about slowing down when there's an accident up ahead. I have a feeling he thought we were smoking pot and got upset that he couldn't smell anything when he approached us, so he just wanted to get his rocks off by yelling at us. He did not give me a ticket.

We had to wait two hours for the accident to clear and for us to be on our way. At that point, I knew I could not continue driving all night. We stopped in Gila Bend and got a room at the Super 8 Motel. It was 2am when we got there. In order for us to get to Artesia on time, we were going to have to leave at 6am. That means we had to pay $50 to spend 4 hours in the room. That was a lot of money back then. It's still a lot of money for sleeping safely for $12.50 an hour. Those two beds made more an hour than I did at the time.

We got up when we needed to and got back on the road. We stopped briefly in Las Cruces and saw Kird and his wife at his parents' house. We visited for maybe an hour before driving to Alamogordo. I dropped off Abed at his sister's house, which she shared with some roommates. Abed and I brought some of her stuff from the car inside. I told the roommates it was nice meeting them, but I would never see them again for the rest of their lives. You know what? I was right (so far).

As I mentioned before, I got to my Mom's house just minutes before the rehearsal was to start. If we had left when I wanted to, we would have been able to drive all the way to Lordsburg, NM by 11pm. (I did this almost every time I drove to Artesia from San Diego.) We would have spent the night there and had plenty of time for me to get to Artesia.

After the wedding and my adventure trying to track down Chez, I drove to Tularosa and caught up with Abed there. I spent the night on the floor in his mom's house, but only managed to get a few hours' sleep. I had brought my keyboard inside. Since we needed to have the music ready, I wiped out the music from the wedding and started fresh with the new track. I basically slapped it together in about two hours. At the time, I thought it sounded good. So did Abed, who heard it after he woke up.

We packed our stuff and headed out. I'll have the next phase of our journey tomorrow.