Lost in time.

We made such good time on the road towards Carlsbad that we pushed on to Roswell, arriving in enough time to get ourselves a room in a pretty decent independent motel called the Frontier (2 x Super 8 - big room; free, working internet; free breakfast and free roll-away bed. And cheap to boot).

We hit a bar across the road from the motel after getting some food, and it was pretty much the bar I'd been looking for to convince me that the stereotypical local bar, just off the highway, that seems to define small-town America in just about every road trip film, does exist.

We got chilled bottles of Bud, inexplicably tasting better than anywhere else so far, and sat back to soak up the atmosphere. There were bikers at the bar, talking to the aging barmaid who had clearly seen it all; there was a Hispanic DJ playing hip hop and R 'n B, except when coerced into a few country tracks by the waltzing, check-shirted locals, and a handful of under-21s that wouldn't have been served anywhere else, dancing away and doing their best to transform it into a big-city club.

Genius. I was liking Roswell already!

The next day we split up to do some laundry and get Josh a haircut. (For the record, he looks just the same as normal so presumably that's a thumbs up for Wal-Mart hairdressers.) In the laundromat ("Suds 'n Fluff") I spent a good half hour talking to some locals who had offered to do our washing for us while we were getting Josh shorn. To our discredit, we were concerned that we'd come back to empty washers and driers, our clothes half-inched by savvy locals looking to rip off the naive foreigners, so Dave dropped me off there after we filled up the tank with gas across the road.

After talking to them, I couldn't have been more wrong. They were open, honest and friendly, recommending some lakes to the east where we could go swimming, and recounting, dead-pan, how if you lived in Roswell long enough you'd see something, if you know what I mean.

We looked around the earnest UFO museum, which did more to convince me of the weather-balloon theory than it did of any sinister explanation, and got lunch. Checking out the day's route, we looked at the notes for our planned daily drives.

"What's the date?" someone asked.
"The 18th," Josh replied, looking at his watch.
"We're supposed to be in Santa Fe now. What happened?"

General consternation.

"It occurs to me that we've lost a day in Roswell."

We jumped in the car and headed north as fast as the highway allowed, the lakes forgotten. An hour later, Josh said from the back seat: "That's funny. The computer says it's only the 17th."
"So does my phone," said Dave.
"Ah. I must've had a time-zone issue."
"What, you got the time zone 25 hours wrong?"

We got to Santa Fe nice and early. I had a swim in the motel pool.