Alternating back and forth, Bird and I have driven across the country a handful of times now. If ever we passed through Albuquerque, NM before, I must have slept thru it. I can remember a number of rest areas in New Mexico, but our previous drive from Dallas, Texas to Redding, California, took me on a route twenty miles south, thru infamous Roswell, NM (which I thought wasn't a very cool or interesting place—just a tiny dusty town with lots of murals of generic aliens; leaving from there, without warning, I went over 100 miles until finding a gas station, which I reached with less-than-zero in the tank).
All I knew of Albuquerque until the other day was the eponymous song by Weird Al, whose only specific and accurate detail about the place is that the "sun is always shining." (If their Holiday Inn is "world famous," as declared in the song, it is only because of him saying so--otherwise, it appears to be a standard-issue Holiday Inn.) Most of the celebration of the city by the song is obviously ironic—it's a 9-minute shitpost story-song about hating sauerkraut, and riffing on the fact that Weird Al is called Al, and so is the querque place with the quirky name.