Laundry in Las Cruces

I arrived in LC on Wednesday, around 3:00. I was tired and had been driving for over 250 miles. I wasn’t thrilled at being on a minor highway, especially when the AAA travel person had said the hotel was downtown. It isn’t. And there are train tracks on the other side of the minor highway.

But I fell in love with my room. I stayed at the Best Western Mission Inn, and it was done in Spanish Mission style, with heavy, carved wood furniture, plaster, and lots of tile. The entire wall behind the bed—king sized!—is built in, creating a tile-topped headboard and surround. The surround has electrical outlets built into the top; the lamps and phone are on the surround and there is plenty of room for laptop, books, water, small children and pets, etc. The ceiling has beams…and acoustical tile, unfortunately. The tile floor in the bath and dressing area is heated radiantly from below.

The hotel has a restaurant: the Blue Agave Café. It wasn’t busy most evenings, so I had lots of time to talk to the waiter. He’s in school, studying to be a special-ed teacher. Nice guy. He said he wished he could be someplace where it rained. The next night, I had thanksgiving dinner at the café. It was quite busy and the servers were jumping. It was raining lightly when I went in to dinner, then slightly harder, and my waiter from the night before teased me about bringing the rain; I proudly took credit for it. Then it started to pour outside and everyone—patron and server—stopped to look. I’m sure they don’t usually get rain that hard.

I did my laundry Friday, in a Laundromat. Most of the machines were running and there were people in and out of there—Hispanic people, Caucasian people, mixed ethnicity people. The attendant was a Hispanic woman, maybe a bit older than me. She was warm and friendly and talkative, and the two of us had a great conversation for over half an hour. She had a big Thanksgiving: her husband, her kids from both marriages, friends from the Laundromat who had no family to be with.

She loves Las Cruces. But some of her family have no jobs right now. So when they all get together for a birthday or something, she said the ones who are working pitch in to cover the ones who aren’t.

I haven’t done laundry in a Laundromat in so long I don’t remember how long it’s been. Mostly I’ve had in-unit or in-building laundry facilities, when I didn’t have my own washer & dryer. The machines here were clean and they work very well. The building was clean. It was a comfortable place. My comfort zone has expanded a couple of notches.

I also shopped for groceries, for books, for another cell phone (my friend Steve put me on his plan as an additional line in the hopes I will help him use up some of his enormous amount of rollover minutes and not go over what seemed like enough minutes on my other plan: if you want my new number, email me), and then got an oil change (over 3,000 miles since my last one, a week or so before I took off).

Las Cruces is very nice and I liked it. But it is too small to give me the kind of work I’d like and it is too sleepy for me. I need somewhere more energetic now, after 7 years in a very sleepy place.