There was really only one thing I definitively wanted to do in Albuquerque: visit a couple of Breaking Bad filming locations. After a conservative breakfast of nothing, I set off for the first location: the car wash.

Needless to say, if you visit the Breaking Bad car wash, you should get your car washed, and conveniently, TARS was pretty filthy from all the dust, so I got a car wash. Went great! Then, I went off in search of Walter White’s home. The address you can find with a simple Google search.

Now, I was generally aware that the people who live in the house (who rented it out to AMC for Breaking Bad) were not entirely pleased with their house becoming a tourist destination for Breaking Bad fans. Which I can kinda see, but on the other hand, if you didn’t want your house to become famous….maybe don’t rent it out as a television location? On the other other hand, there’s plenty of stories of people being huge assholes and throwing pizza on their roof, so I can see why they’d be fed up with things.

The house is very noticable because there’s a series of orange cones out front, a huge wrought-iron spiked fence around the outside, and it’s covered in “keep out” and “private property” signs. I slowed down and there was a sign out that said:

Or “Take your pictures from across the street. Do Not Disturb Us.” Seems reasonable to me. I went down to the end of the street, turned around, came back, paused my car across the street, and rolled down my window to take the picture.

Immediately after I took the picture, a woman came out of the garage, on the phone. I raised my hand in a friendly wave as I closed the window, to let her know, hey, I’m doing what the sign says, not here to fuck with your life – and she immediately flipped me off.

I was laughing all the way out of Albuquerque.

Today’s travels were fairly quiet, from Albuquerque down to Carlsbad Caverns, which is one of the main places I wanted to go on this trip. I’ll be here for two nights, so will have a full day tomorrow just doing the Caverns and exploring the park. The only semi-interesting thing that happened was a bottle of soda violently exploded when I opened it whilst driving down the freeway. Violently. As if it had just been deliberately shaken up by a malevolent gas station clerk. So it went all over me – shirt, lap, seat, etc. Also, it was during one of those stretches between towns and where the next rest stop is 60 miles.

After a few miles, I found a small turn-off off the highway and dug clean clothes out of my suitcase. I carry a thing of baby wipes with me for obvious reasons, so I was able to mop the spilled soda off the steering wheel and seat, then climb in the car, strip, cleanse myself, and get dressed. It’s possibly one of the most awkward things to do while sitting in a car and having a steering wheel in front of you, all while twitching every time a new car comes over the hill in the distance to see whether or not it’s the cops. I can picture a cop pulling over and coming up and then saying something like “Son, why are you naked from the waist down?” and then me trying to explain that I didn’t want my family jewels to be covered in drying Sprite for the next three hours of the drive across New Mexico, and even if he bought that, he’d probably ask for my ID, and then I’d have to deal with the whole driver’s license fiasco.

But that didn’t happen, and I arrived at my motel just outside Carlsbad Caverns, and the package with my new driver’s license was waiting for me. Crisis averted!