Albuquerque: June 29-30th. Feelin quirky in The Querque

When we rolled in to Albuquerque we had instant Breaking Bad fever. The show was the entertainment journey of the van life trip experience. Very fitting to go to this strange city in the middle of the desert where it all takes place. I think it would have been far less thrilling without the constant tickling knowledge we were in Walt and Jesse's domain.

We found free parking in front of the museums... which we did not pay to go in but did take photos in front of as though we had.

From there we went to the Old Town, where we spent more than we usually do per meal on a fancy french creperie restaurant. The good thing about this restaurant was that there was a tree growing through it, next to our table:

The not so good thing about this restaurant was the food.

After the expensive and disappointing meal we did more exploring around the Old district:

 

While in the park pictured above, we were approached and talked at by an elder Native American man. He told us about his heritage, the books he's written, how much he hates The Man, The Government, The President, etc. After his rambling had stopped being cute, I got a nice saving grace phone call from my brother. I left KG to it and wandered to the other side of the park to talk. We almost didn't find each other after he escaped his new friend, but all was well. I decided that people in the south (Tennessee, North & South Carolina etc) we'd encoutnered seemed to want to talk TO you, get to know you, exchange stories and information with anyone they happen to meet in the street. And in the Southwest, it seemed people were also often likely to want to engage you in conversation, but they usually wanted to talk AT you about their specific version of crazy. Which can also be fun, but sometimes you have to run out of grocery stores..

Alright. Enough with the not Breaking Bad specific tourism, we said. We looked up a random cafe with wifi on my crazy modern intelligent phone at which to go use the real computer instead of the internet phone to look up locations and addresses. One of the first locations we discovered was... THE VERY CAFE WE WERE IN AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT!
If you've seen the show: the awesome scene where Walt goes to Tuco's office and goes out with a bang? Well:

Pretty cool. Completely by coincidence. We'd even looked up multiple other cafes that ended up non-existent or closed before we settled at this one.. just before close! Again. Pretty cool.

From there we went to seek out other show locations -- this may be uninteresting to you non-Breaking-Bad folk out there, but it made Albuquerque all the better for us, especially as it was our "trip show", began watching during the journey and completed it along with everyone else on the Real Television upon our return to Chicago. Anyhow, here is stuff:

 

Where Badger got picked up

 

Where Jesse once lived

 

Where Walt and Jane's dad drank.

While we had beers at the local bar (where a scene was filmed) we were given a free sweet pink shot for gay pride weekend -- good on ya, Albuquerque.

We closed the night out at Walmart, of course. Nice views to wake up to for a Walmart, eh?:

And the next morning we climbed a mountain!

From there we went to explore the ancient petroglyphs. Recommended and on our way out of the city, we were fairly excited for what turned out to be a hot, ugly, smaller mountain than the one we already climbed... with no spots for shade, lots of other miserable looking tourists sweating and climbing up the narrow path whilst muttering miseries under their breath. There are some extremely ancient ones... but we were told you can't actually see those ones in the sunny sunny sunshine. So the ones we did see weren't so ancient. Bah.

It wasn't the highest note to end on, but then again Albuquerque wasn't the highest height of the trip. But it certainly had its moments and its charms. Thanks for the entertainment, Walt, Jesse & co.

On to Arizona!