The Night of October 24th had me packing and trying to get everything loaded into the trailer and truck. I really should have done more packing in advance, but oh well. I ended up doing some more packing/loading Wed morning before I left, and finally hit the road at about 9am. The weather forecast had some wind in store and I did in fact hit that between raton and las vegas. Pulling the trailer in a 30+mph headwind wasn't much fun, and boy did it kill my already abysmal gas millage, but I made it down to Las Cruces just fine around 9pm (a 12 hour drive). $1.999 gas when I fueled up before leaving town! Amusingly, the pump was also running IE, and it's DNS was borked. ;) A picture from a rest area on the way down. Got the trailer all parked in front of Nukestock HQ and setup. Got power hooked up and called it a pretty early night. Thursday we did a bunch of walks in the park for the dogs, a trip over to my friend V's place to let the dogs run around in his gigantic back yard, and some assorted errands and setup of decorations. Thursday night was the beer tasting event. We had a pretty gigantic pile of beers to try. There wasn't much of a crowd for most of the event, but people came and tried a few beers and wandered on. There were some real nice beers and some really yucky ones. Kurt wasted no time in V's yard finding a pool to lay in. My friend K and a few more pups. Here's the bar before we went and stocked it up for the weekend. A few of the decorations. A view out to the trailer. Friday was more setup and mexican food. Go-Burger has delightfull breakfast Borittos. The party went into full swing friday night. Lots of folks and drinking and having a good time. There were people I haven't seen in years there, and it was nice to catch up with them and also the folks I hadn't seen since last years party. There was a friday night trivia game this year at around 11pm. There was one group of questions that was "what's in this disgusting drink". Some of those were real stomach turners. :) Saturday started out with more mexican food and a trip by V's to let the pups run in the big yard and also to pick up more firewood. Then, it was time for the road rally. It was really pretty fun this year. I like the way V had it setup. You get a photo of a place somewhere in Las Cruces. You can try and find it based on just the picture, or you can open up to 3 clues. The first 2 clues are more pictures with more clues in them, and the last one is a GPS coordinate. Once you find a site there is a bag with some tokens in it, the first team to a site gets the token worth the most points, etc. It was nice. We took a long detour at one point because I am an idiot and missed a turn, but otherwise we did well. We only had to open one second clue. I really liked the format this year. Saturday night was the full on party. Lots more drinking and K was grilling things for dinner. Lots of food, lots of drink. Big trivia game was as silly as it ever is. There was a obnoxious neighbor that stopped by, but my friend B manning the bar just gave him lots of booze and finally he wandered off to pass out. Things finally winded down around 4 or 5 am. Sunday was the after party brunch. It was nice to not have to look forward to the long drive home after the brunch this year, since I was going to stay and work from the trailer parked in front of K's house monday, tuesday and wed. Got back after brunch and helped clean things up. Lots of trash was generated this year. I guess it's not too surprising. Trash pile was most impressive. The trailer worked wonderfully. The pups got pretty used to hanging out in it and having the a/c and such was handy. The bed was pretty comfy. Parking and driving and backing were all pretty easy too. All in all another excellent nukestock. ... to be continued in park 2: hunting in the Gila soon.