23 things I learned on my road trip to Santa Fe over the weekend

1. Beau is a jerky-eating machine
2. He can also down a 24-oz. can of Starbucks Double-Shot Espresso in record time
3. Las Vegas, New Mexico, is the place where old school buses go to die
4. Convenience stores are much cleaner than I initially gave them credit for
5. The clouds in New Mexico are so beautiful they look like they've been photoshopped
6. At Trader Joe's, you can buy 15 bottles of wine, two six-packs, and snacks for $111 (I was stocking up, btw, I'm not that much of a boozer)
7. You can spend 78 straight hours with someone and still love them at the end of the trip
8. Our hotel-room neighbors to the west liked to have ridiculously loud early morning sex (5:30 a.m.??? Come on, people!)
9. Breakfast tastes better with chorizo
10. Contemporary Chamber Music sounds a lot like the music you hear when the heroine finds out that the call is coming from inside the house!
11. Overpacking is always better than underpacking (unless you're going to Europe)
12. Las Vegas, New Mexico, has a billboard that says As Seen In the Movies! They're not kidding; All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, Easy Rider, the Lonesome Dove series, and a slew of others were filmed there
13. Any time my dad calls me when I'm on vacation with Beau, he starts every chat/message with the words I hope I'm not interrupting anything...
14. I'm not usually a fan of religious iconography, but I find myself drawn to it in Santa Fe and I always come back with something bearing the likeness of the Virgin Mary
15. Fatherhood has tamed the craziest bachelor I've ever met 
16. Any time you set the cruise control on the car, someone will inevitably cut you off and slow way the eff down to screw it up for you
17. Beau's musical tastes are much broader than I initially thought (he sat through Kenny Rogers' You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille without even wincing)
18. The man who invented the home pregnancy test is a fan of Contemporary Chamber Music (I met him)
19. Sometimes you DO get to see the person who's driving like a maniac get pulled over (it's one of life's sweeter moments, I assure you)
20. It's freeing to go out of town without your watch
21. You never have to ask yourself if your outfit (big floppy hat and long gauzy dress to fight sun damage) looks stupid in Santa Fe because everyone's outfit looks a little stupid in Santa Fe. Nobody cares
22. They put green chili on everything in Santa Fe
23. When you see a double rainbow, it's not nearly as exciting as that dude on YouTube lets on