We woke up today
feeling pretty grim following the evening's beer sampling and vowed that tonight
would be an early night to recover.We woke up today
feeling pretty grim following the evening's beer sampling and vowed that tonight
would be an early night to recover.
Today's journey was a slow climb of 3000ft into the mountains of New
Mexico. The temperature dropped and the scenery changed to scrub and
brush.
We stopped
at a visitor's center in New Mexico where we gained an hour (which came in handy
at the end of the day). The visitor's center had signs everywhere warning
of poisonous snakes and insects so we felt very safe!!
We changed our plans a little as Albuquerque was not very far from Amarillo and so decided to continue to Gallup in New Mexico. We didn't stop for lunch today, still feeling too hungover.
But pronounced a day of contrasts as it featured some excellent moments and
some very depressing moments. 
Just
out of Amarillo Chris started to notice a loud ticking from under the hood of
ZPOWER and a drop oil pressure from the usual 60psi to around 15-20psi. We
found a local dealership in Gallup, which was about ankle deep in mud up a steep
dirt track, obviously ideal conditions for the rear wheel drive Z. We left
the car at the dealership and found some local digs feeling very depressed
indeed. We sat around like impatient fathers awaiting news from the
dealership. At 6pm they told us to call tomorrow which obviously made us
feel worse. We debated whether or not we were too depressed to go out to
the pub or not to load up on depressives. In the end, however, reason
prevailed and we got a taxi to the local entertainment spot, PJs. It was
bloody freezing out.
The place was fairly quiet to start with, we ordered a few beers (an interesting Microbrew called Fat Tire) and had some dinner. We moved into the main bar area afterwards and threw a few games of darts then retired to the bar for some more beer and to do some crowd watching. The place had an extremely mixed crowd: Cowboys with fancy hats and ironed jeans, Native Americans, Hispanics and or course two lost Brits. A DJ started up and played music ranging from Country & Western to AC/DC to Rap and everything in between and the place started to get very crowded.
By the end of the evening we had consumed far too many fat tires but had been taught to two step and were taking to the dance floor. At 1:30am we called for a cab but were told that cabs had stopped running. This wasn't a problem however as the friendly locals were all volunteering to take us back to the hotel and so we had another beer and took a ride back with Lucille and her Brother Jez, two Navajo Native Indians. Tonight was by far the best night so far and we'd all but forgotten about the problems with ZPOWER. Thanks to everyone at PJs for making our night memorable.