JOMEL Adventures Positivity (def): "Anything other than being in the office."

Our first night on the road trip landed us in Odessa, Texas. We got in late, so rather than set the tent up, we decided to test out sleeping in the car, which was one of the requirements when we bought it. We had heard back home that Walmart car parks are open 24/7 so we pulled up at one of the Walmart giants and set up for sleep. Neither of us slept well however and we decided against Walmart carparks as a place to sleep in future. Despite the 24/7 toilets, it is noisy, too light and not necessarilly the safest place to stay as it attracts many interesting characters.
Next day, Wed 23rd April, we drove to Albuquerque where we due for our first WWOOFing experience. For those that aren't aware WWOOFing stands for (World Wide Opportunities on Organice Farms)- an acronym I can never remember! Before we left Australia we registered with WWOOF USA as we had heard about it from friends and thought it would be a great way to travel cheaply, meet some cool people and steer clear of the more typical tourist destinations. The scenery along the drive prooved deserted but interesting. We saw many oil wells in action- something I had never seen before. It was a little shocking to see just how many there were scattered over the incredibly desolate land, how bad it smelt and how polluted the air was. And we stopped in at Roswell for lunch and to check out the dodgy UFO museum....Jo found it kind of cool, but me, not so much. I think the UFO gimmicks are a little over done and didn't seem to be attracting that many tourists either.
Our first experience WWOOFing was with a large scale organic farm operation in Albuquerque called Los Poblanos. And by large scale we mean they made over a million dollars profit a year and needed to produce 1000kg of tomatoes each month to satisfy their customers! The interesting thing about this farm is that we couldn't stay on site as with most WWOOFing places. The farm was also an expensive Inn where guests could stay, and dirty farm hands didn't quite fit into the serene environment they were trying to create :) Instead we stayed with a lovely South African lady named Sandra listed in the WWOOFing book, and drove to the farm each day. We started work at 6:45am and it was freezing at that time. But by 12 noon we were getting sunburnt. We were definitely noticing the desert climate. We were the only WWOOFers at Los Poblanos and the long term apprentices took a while to warm to us. We later found out this was due to some poor experiences with WWOOFers in the past who really didn't do much work. The farm manager said we were the best WWOOFers they'd had though so hopefully we changed their opinion a little. We spent 3 days at Los Poblanos plus the weekend in Albuquerque and the farm work consisted mostly of weeding (we learnt how to use a hoe really well!), a little harvesting for the farmer's markets and preparing/planting a sunflower bed. If we had of stayed one more day we would have been able to join in the 1000 CSA membership party Los Poblanos was holding. CSA stands for 'Community Supported Agriculture' and many organic farms provide fruit and vegetables to CSA members. Overall we had a positive first WWOOF experience and Sandra was a very welcoming host who took us to some really cool alternative short movies, recommended some places to eat (The Flying Star!) and took us on a hike on the nearby La Luz trail. While in Alburquerque we also checked out the outdoor Earth Festival on Sunday where we saw salsa dancing, bought Sandra some sunflowers which we planted in her backyard as a departing thank you gift. We also managed to get Jo some much needed new reading glasses in Albuquerque which were lost with his stolen backpack in Atlanta. But 5 days after arriving it was time to move on again.