Actor/director Sean Penn and 120 participants in Penn's Dirty Hands Caravan, which left Indio, Calif., Monday and hopes to arrive in New Orleans next Tuesday, made a stop at a Las Cruces campground Tuesday night, according to the Las Cruces Sun-News.

Three biodiesel buses are making the trip in order to inspire a new generation of activists, to "encourage individuals to take individual actions," according to The Dirty Hands Caravan Web site.

Caravan participants are having their food, water, transportation and campground accommodations paid for in exchange for service at a variety of churches, homeless shelters, volunteer activities, antiwar protests and immigrant rights rallies along the way, according to the Web site.

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan was a special after-dinner speaker at the Las Cruces stopover Tuesday night, according to the Sun-News.

"It was another really cool day on the Dirty Hands Caravan," 13-year-old blogger Pat Pedraja wrote in the caravan diary on DoSomething.org. "We finally stopped driving around 8 p.m. at the State Fairgrounds in Los (sic) Cruces, New Mexico."

"I see this as a reckoning," Penn told the Hollywood Reporter on the eve of the tour last week. "My generation and those that came before have to recognize the numbing of incentive that we've passed on to the change hungry, imaginative, smarter than us youth of today."