Exactly 48 hours ago, I was screaming down the South Boundry Trail on my bike, making my way from Angel Fire to Taos through pristine stands of Aspen, with Elk running through the valley below me. The bike was running flawlessly, the air was cool, the views spectacular.

Now I’m at work, sitting at my desk, going through the 500 emails I got last week. Oh, and it’s going to hit at least 100 degrees today.

Dammit.

The best converstation I’ve heard in long time – we’re checking in to the lovely travel-lodge in Amarillo, and in walks Winston Churchill’s long-lost younger brother who’s apparently been wandering around the Texas panhandle for the past forty years. He rolls up to the the kind of sad, emo-Amarillo-hotel-clerk:

WCYB: You’ve got be bloody kidding me…

Clerk: Uh, sir?

WCYB: You’ve got a huge bloody sign out there saying you have rooms for $39.99 and you’re charging me sixty dollars.

Clerk: Sir those rooms are for the upstairs singles, and as I told you, the Jehovah’s Witness convention is in town and has all the rooms booked.

WCYB: Then why do you still have your big bloody sign up (no shit he said ‘bloody’ that many times)?

Clerk: Uh, it’s a big damn sign.

WCYB (turning to us as Liz is signing the bill): And you, you got the $39.99 rate?

We kind of had to leave before we started laughing uncontrollably.

Tomorrow we hit the road, bound for New Mexico in the annual sojourn to get the hell out of the absurdly overheated Texas summertime. If all goes well, tomorrow night we’ll be in scenic Amarillo, and Friday morning we’ll roll in to Red River just about the time the Fourth of July parade starts.

I’ve traveled to New Mexico by car more times than I can count - from the early morning rollout in the family mini-van to last year’s solo subaru excursion. The packing, the driving out from town, making coffee by the side of the road, new-and-scenic Texas panhandle gas stations, books-on-tape, that really inserting musty small your car gets after being driven for 10 hours, and best of all, the first faint outlines of the Sangre de Cristos on the horizon as you barrel west on sub-standard New Mexican asphalt - all part of the fun.

I’m not sure excatly how it’s going to happen, but I’m damned certain that when the end of the world does go down, PowerPoint will some how be to blame.

I heard a story recently about some DJ’s in San Antonio who were loosing their job because the station was changing formats, so hijacked the broadcast for several days straight, and played nothing but Tone-Loc’s Funky Cold Medina, unitl the police finally caught up with them.  Apparently this is not an uncommon prank - from XHTO-FM in Ciudad Juarez/El Paso:

In an unusual opening, the station played the song Funky Cold Medina for 76 straight hours.

That’s an intresting marketing strategy.