June 12

As soon as we wake up in the morning, Christie starts suffering from an extensive craving for coffee, somethig that we had in fact not seen in a while. Christ indly tells us where is the closest Starbucks located, and after Christie has changed into her jogging outfit, she tries and convince everyone to come along. This is how we finally all decide to go for a healthy run to Starbucks, which, according to Chris' description, was supposed to be very close, although it was actually much further away than we would have ever gone. So we all change into our own jogging outfits and start running, except for Triet-ly who takes a bike and goes scouting the Starbucks by herself. Christie nominates herself as the leader of the crew, and starts running as fast as she can followed by the rest of us. Matt follows her closeby, while Lyyly and Jeremy just run behind, using Tomatha as an excuse for being slowed down. Jeremy in fact had the bad idea to bring Tomatha along, convinced that she would be pretty happy to go for a long walk accross the semi-arid land of New Mexico. Yet, he soon found out that Tomatha is not such a good runner as she is a good attacker. Indeed, as we stop for a little break at some point perhaps about 2 miles away from the point of departure, we notice a long path of blood foot-steps behind us. This is how we realize that Tomatha had been running for a long while without complaining about the fact that her paws were bleeding pretty bad. And Jeremy obviously did not notice a thing until now. So we realize it's probably time to stop for now, and we all gather at some random coffe shop in a shopping center on the way to the Starbucks, except for Triet-ly who had obviously been much faster than us with the bike and was probably already at the Starbucks pretty far away, waiting for us without any idea of what had just happened here.

We take our coffees, and decide to wait for Triet-ly to come back with the bike so that we can bike home and grab pigpen, since Tomatha is obviously unable to walk home in this condition. Triet-ly does not however seem to be found, we call the Starbuck, where the employees reckon seeing her but tell us that she has already disapeared by now. Eventually, Triet-ly comes back to where we are. Lyyli takes her bike and rides back to the house, followed by Christie who runs back after her, in order to grab pigpen and bring it to the coffee shop in order to drive Tomatha back home.

As Lyyli and Christie come back with pigpen, they find Jeremy and Matt playing chess, while Triet-ly is doing her usual stretching exercices on the ground, with Tomatha looking at her with a mixture of envy and disdain. While waiting for Matt and Jeremy to finish their game, Christie and Lyyli join Triet-ly in her stretchnig exercises and realize for the first time that most of Triet-ly's exercises, albeit apparently non-sensical, were actually based on some solid physical constructs.

Then Jeremy and Christie go shopping for some presents for Chris, this very nice girl who was hosting us all in her housing-sitting mansoin. As they didn't find anything that Chris may actually enjoy, they come back with a bunch of groceries with the plan to make her a very nice meal to thank her for her amazing hospitality. So we all get back home to Chris, where we meet the 3 other friends of her with whom she was having a study session. Triet-ly improvises herself as a cook and makes some delicious pasta lunch which everybody loved and ate very very fast, while Jeremy was focusing on the dessert, as he introduces his new specialty: the banana-berry-truffle dessert, an amazing mixture of chocolate, berries and bananas. Then as we get ready to go, Triet-ly realizes that we will never make it in time for her plane from Washington DC on the 14th, and she absolutely has to attend a dancing workshop on the 15th. Jeremy and Lyyli think that we could find her a plane to hitchike, but Triet-ly seems sceptical about that eventuality, so she finally decide to take a rideshare for the next day from Santa Fe to Berkeley.

And we therefore go to Santa Fe. On the way, we encounter one hitchhiker who looks like a mixture between a hippie and a bum. He asks us whether we are going to the National Rainbow gathering in Cuba. We tell him we are not, and that we actually had no idea the Rainbow Gathering was going on anywhere close to where we are. Jeremy starts telling us about this one time he went to a Rainbow Gathering and how cool it was, and how it is a little bit like burning man but in the forrest as opposed to the desert, etc.. and we consequently consider the possibility of going there after we go to Taos.

We keep driving, enjoying the boring landscape on our way, until we arrive to downtown Santa Fe. We kindof wanna go out and party, especially since this is the last day of Triet-ly who is gonna leave us tomorrow, but we don't really have any idea where to go or what to do in Santa Fe. So before going out and enjoying the nightlife, we decide to park somewhere in the center and to have dinner and get drunk inside the RV before adventuring ourselves out. Not only is it much cheaper than going out, but it's also definitely more fun. After a few beers and a gigantic bottle of wine have been successfully ingurgitated, we realize we are all pretty drunk, except for Matt who has given up on alcohol long before the begining of this road trip. We start to feel a little bit claustrophobic inside of pigpen, so we decide to get out of the RV and we start walking around and wandering around randomly into the street of downtown Santa Fe. The city surprise us for having a pretty nice downtown, in spite of the first impression we had when we first drove accross the city. The citiy seems to be very lively for a friday night, and we run into a bunch of potentially cool people, we keep walking down the streets without any precise objetive in mind, patiently waiting for the Tao to decide for our faith and to eventually let us know what should be coming next..

And once again, as is usually the case, Matt decides to create some interaction with random people in the street and consequently engages into an interesting discussion with some random bums who were playing guitar in the middle of the street. One after the other, we eventually all stop there in order to talk with them. Lyyli and Jeremy are very eager to let them know about the fact that they are still unable to play the guitar in spite of their former 3 months-long pact which ultimately consisted of playing 1 hour of guitar everyday, while Matt and Christie, who cannot play any kind of instrument either, were just rambling about music in general. Triet-ly, who really could not care less about any of that, just doesn't give a fuck and keep playing with Tomatha in the street. Then somehow the discussion completely derives into a new topic, something about dogs, and Tomatha obviously becomes the new center of attention. Jeremy starts telling the whole story of Tomatha to our new friends, ranging from the necessary adoption in order to avoid her being killed at the pound, to the recent serial killer tendencies she has been developing along the way. And naturally, the more Jeremy talks about her, the more the bums seems to enjoy the dog, until one of them suddenly asks Jeremy whether he would be willing to give her to him. Jeremy instinctively does not want to give Tomatha away, but circumstances require so. In fact, because of the yes-pact that Jeremy had engaged into, Jeremy has to say yes to everything, no matter what the nature of the question is. Besides, Jeremy was aware that Tomatha would probably never be accepted into any kind of pound and would probably end up being killed or killing another dog, so giving her away to that bum was probably the best thing he could do, both for the well-being of the dog and for our own well-being. We thus bring the bum back with us to the RV. We grab all of Tomatha's stuff and we give everythig away to that lucky bum, who immediately walks away back into the streets of Santa Fe together with his beautiful new dog.

As Tomatha leaves us with her new owner, we stay and we hang out on the bridge just next to where the RV was parked, an interesting bridge where we encounter 6 crazy people in a row, that would all stop and talk to us for some reason, including that angry man that really wanted us to accept his help and was gonna kick our ass if we wouldn't let him give us a place to shower and other stuff.
As we were about to leave in order to find a better parking for the night, Matt finds out that the back tire of the RV is completely fucked, so we start looking for a Wal-mart with a tire service in Santa Fe and we go to the Wal-mart parking lot to go to sleep. We all pass out asleep, except for Jeremy and Triet-ly who decide to take exctasy instead of going to sleep and spend the whole night exploring the beautiful surroundings of the Wal-mart parking lot..