Savannah is one of my favorite American cities to visit. I saw this city once, for two days, back in 2021 right after that year's Suwannee Hulaween festival in Florida. So since I was going to Hulaween again in 2023, and wanted to do some post-festival trips in the following week, there was never a question Savannah would be the first stop. Especially since I'd read the "non-fiction novel" Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and wanted to see some of the places where scenes in the book were set.

Suwannee Hulaween is one of the best music festivals in the US. It's an eclectic mix of jam and funk bands with EDM producers from a range of subgenres. I'd been to this once before, in 2021, and while I couldn't make it back in 2022, I did have the opportunity in 2023.

While the first half of my Albuquerque trip was all about bouncing around on buses and visiting big museums, the second half would involve mostly driving to other attractions, and finally riding that RailRunner train to Santa Fe.

By the time Labor Day weekend of 2023 rolled around, I had lived in New Mexico for over two and a half years, but somehow never got around to visiting the state's biggest city. I'd flown out of and into the airport there a few times, and I had a doctor's appointment in the city once, but I'd never actually looked around at anything or spent the night there. But then in the summer of 2023 I found out that Pantera, one of the '90s' most legendary metal bands whose surviving members had just reunited and were doing a long worldwide reunion tour, would be in Albuquerque on August 31. For me that was the night before a four-day weekend, so finally I was going to see what Albuquerque had to offer.