Drive to Las Cruces

First I have to say that I am a tremendous fan of the 70, and even 80 in some spots, speed limit!  Granted this is all open road pretty much in the middle of nowhere so it would never fly say in Virginia or NY. But man is it fun.  

The drive from Santa Fe took about 4 hours.  And with the exception of Albuquerque there's not a whole lot to see on the drive down.  We left Santa Fe around 3:30 so for about half of our trip down we were in the dark.  We finally arrived to Las Cruces around 7:30 and found our next hotel, the Lundeen Inn of the Arts. www.innofthearts.com   I will say that in the end I really enjoyed this place, but on that first night I was skeptical.  When we got there, no one was there.  At first we thought we were locked out only to find the main entrance on the side with the door open.  There was a key laying out with my name on the paper but we had no clue where the room was.  Finally after walking through a huge dining room area full of paintings we found a girl in the kitchen (who turned out to be the owner's granddaughter) and she led us to our room.  There are only 7 rooms in this Inn and each one is named after a famous artist.  Ours was of course, Georgia O'Keeffe.  The room was fine, a double bed and a twin with a huge mosquito net covering it (or "the canopy bed I always wanted" as i referred to it.)  At this point I had begun to convince myself the place was haunted (still not entirely convinced it isn't) or that it was reminiscent of the Shining.  haha  But I swear I heard sounds where no people were and lights flickered and paintings appeared to stare at you.  Despite all the "haunting" we did make it through the night and awoke to what felt like a different Inn in the daytime.