Around the WorldNew Mexico in Eighty Days
Generally speaking, we started in the middle (in Albuquerque) and made a lopsided figure-eight from there: first up and to the left to nearby Colorado, then back to the middle to Santa Fe, then a bigger loop down and to the right, briefly touching Texas and even Mexico, and finally back to Albuquerque. With the exception of the two last nights in Albuquerque, we stayed in each hotel for just one night. I never got to unpack properly...
So anyway, here is the trip report, day by day.
Day 1
After umpteen hours of flight, two breakfasts (they insisted on feeding us breakfast at the Chicago airport, claiming it was only 8 am, while for us it definitely felt more like lunchtime, 6 hours after our first breakfast that day), and finally a proper lunch in Albuquerque, we headed northwest in our beautiful rented SUV. We didn't take a picture of the SUV right away, and since we immediately did some off-road driving we couldn't take a picture that would do it justice until we washed it a few days later, but I am placing it here a bit out of sequence. Here it is:
That day we drove (that is, Alex drove) about 300 miles on top of the plane ride, and by about 10 pm, local time, we arrived in Cortez, CO, where we spent the first night. Cortez goes to bed early and nothing was open at 10 pm, so that's where we finally ate our sandwiches, packed just in case (for example, if our first flight got delayed and we didn't have time to eat in Chicago). I knew they would come in handy! After that, we were too exhausted to do much of anything but sleep.
Day 2
Second day started with Mesa Verde.
Talk about amazing! We didn't get to go to the Balcony House, where you climb a series of tall ladders along the cliff, because it hasn't yet reopened after the winter. End of April in the Colorado mountains is still early spring: though the temperatures were in the 60s, we saw quite a bit of snow by the roadside. That was a bit disappointing. But we did go to the Cliff Palace -- here it is, carved out of the mountainside 800 years ago!..
...and the Spruce Tree House, which was reconstructed to a greater degree. So it is less authentic, but you get to do some fun interactive stuff. Here I am going into and sitting in a kiva, and Temma is grinding corn, in a time-honored tradition... She didn't get to throw it at anybody to complete the experience...
We got done with Mesa Verde around 3 pm (could have easily spent another couple of days there!) and continued our travel eastward. Stopped for lunch in Durango -- which looked like a nice little town with historic and cultural background, and might have been fun to explore, have we had more time -- and then drove on to Pagosa Springs. The springs (as in, hot springs) are right in the river, and the Springs resort, where we stayed, has 11 picturesque pools of different shapes and with varying water temperature, like this...
Day 3
After the final morning dip in the hot springs, we headed south, towards Santa Fe. We planned to stop in Taos along the way, but that road was closed. We went to Los Alamos instead and saw the museum detailing the Manhattan project. Very educational.Santa Fe is an undisputed fine arts capital of the Southwest and beyond. It is chock full of art galleries and small jewelry stores, with all kinds of art spilling out onto the streets. I was fascinated by the street sculpture. Not only are they colorful, but look at the details!
Fine food, as usual, follows fine art. A very nice French restaurant is located in the Burro alley (which is decorated with burro images, like this)...
...and next door to our hotel was Cafe Le Zodiak. Now that's what I call hot chocolate!
Also a block from our hotel was the famous Loretto chapel, with a "miracle" staircase. It makes a 360 degrees turn without any visible means of support.
Day 4
The next day started with the hot chocolate, shown above, and some more store browsing. We got some very nice turquoise jewelry for the females in the family and, after lunch, started on the next big loop of our journey. We had to travel another 300 mi down southeast and arrive to Carlsbad by nightfall, to report to Carlsbad Caves bright and early the following morning. So most of the day was spent driving very fast along an (almost) empty divided highway through an (almost) empty desert-like landscape.Along the way, we passed Roswell, home of the International UFO museum and the site of countless UFO encounters... We didn't see any UFOs, with the possible exception of a white car that overtook us on the empty highway. Alex was going a conservative 90 (out of respect to the local police possibly having figured out places to hide in the surrounding flat emptiness). Having gotten such a leader, he of course upped it up a bit and tried to follow, but gave up when he was going 110 and the white car was still receding ahead. So the white car left unidentified, and it was certainly flying towards Roswell... By the time we reached Roswell, the UFO museum was closed, but I wanted to drive through the town to get the feel of the place. What can I say? If I was an alien and had to stick to small nondescript towns in the area, I would rather go to Durango...
We arrived in Carlsbad earlier than we expected and made our first mistake. One of the attractions of the caves is the flight of bats. At dusk, thousands of bats fly out of the cave and you can watch them do it. But the bats are seasonal, and not supposed to arrive until later in the year. We knew that and didn't bother to check. Turns out, some of them -- just a few hundred -- arrived early, and if we only drove another 20 miles to the caves that evening, we could have seen them fly. But we didn't...
Day 5
The Carlsbad Caves are unbelievable! We did only one guided tour (the Left-Hand Tunnel tour with lanterns) because on most guided tours they do not allow children under 12. This is a clear example of age discrimination, which my spunky 10-year-old proved by doing more than 5 hours of running, walking, climbing, and exploration inside these caves without a peep. We did the two self-guided tours: first you enter through the mouth of the cave (the natural entrance) and go down, down, down... along a spiral path that leads you to the Big Room, about 17 stories deep (to relieve the suspense, let me mention right now that there is an elevator, which takes you up after you are done). The second self-guided tour is going around the Big Room, which is really big. There are walkways and lights strategically placed around the Big Room, but not in the Left-Hand Tunnel, where you need a guide and lanterns (and a prior reservation, as they only take 15 people). At one point, the guide made us blow out the lanterns (after having checked first that her lighter works), and let me tell you, it is really dark there. As in, you can't see anything. Very uncomfortable...So here we are, starting the descent...
... here are some wonders we've seen along the way...
... and this is the lantern tour...
We were done in the caves by around 4 pm, had an unmemorable lunch at the diner nearby, and made our second mistake by failing to fill up the tank. Gas stations in this part of the world are few and far between, so this mistake might have turned out to be very costly... We were traveling pretty much on fumes when we finally came to a station, and it was fortunately open.
We spent the night in El Paso, in a very nice Holiday Inn Express, and had dinner in a very pleasant Italian restaurant nearby, recommended by the clerk at the reception desk. Unfortunately, these two places, the hotel and the restaurant, are pretty much the highlights of El Paso... In the evening we went for a stroll around the downtown area and it was very disappointing. Some remnants of former glory maybe, but nothing to do or look at now...
Day 6
Since we were in El Paso anyway, we decided to walk across the border to Mexico and have lunch there. If you've spent a significant part of your life in the Soviet Russia, you get a kick out of just walking across a border on a whim. Like other people climb mountains: "Because it was there!.." So there was this border with Mexico, and here I am standing on it.
See the smile? -- that's on the way there... I would say, this pretty much turned out to be our third mistake. This part of Mexico struck me as dirty and unpleasant, with people alternately begging for money or trying to sell you some worthless junk in a very insistent way. I didn't dare feeding my family there, but I had to use a bathroom at one point, and the sooner this experience is forgotten the better... The price, by the way, is exactly the same as for crossing the border, 35 cents -- being able to actually wait until on our side of the border would have been priceless... The only pleasant impression of visiting this part of Mexico was left by a mango cut up like a pine cone, shown below.
Having returned to our car, we ate a quick lunch along the way and headed to the aircraft museum, our main purpose in visiting El Paso in the first place (that, and the fact that we had to get back somehow from Carlsbad to Albuquerque). The museum has some interesting exhibits, including the MIG-15 and P-40 Warhawk (with teeth)...
This is still Day 6 -- next stop, White Sands. This turned out to be much more fun than I expected. The weather was just perfect for it -- I am told that in the summer the sand gets unbearably hot, but here it was nice and cool, very fine, mostly hard-packed so you can walk on it, and the dunes soft enough to let the rest of my family jump, roll, and play leapfrog. And the view -- magnificent!..
It was very hard to convince the kids to leave, but I had a goal: to pass the lava beds before nightfall (we also had a more remote goal, to arrive in Albuquerque at a more-or-less reasonable hour, because we were staying in a small motel owned by a retired couple, and didn't want to have them wait up for us). So here are the lava beds:
Day 7
As I said, we were staying in a small motel, which I found in the AAA guide and it seemed too good to be true. It was situated on the famous Route 66, a few minutes' walk, literally, from the historic town center and all the little museums, shops and cafes, and very reasonably priced. It also turned out to be extremely clean and well-maintained, with very nice and friendly owners, and here we spent our last two nights. (I suppose I could have finally unpacked, but there didn't seem to be any sense in doing so at this point.)Old town in Albuquerque is in some ways similar to Santa Fe -- the same adobe-style architecture, abundance of little shops and cafes and of local artists selling their crafts (including turquoise jewelry...) -- but it is more compact and, I would say, more relaxed. You can walk around the whole place in 15-20 minutes. You can also spend hours exploring the little museums (such as the Turquoise museum, or the Rattlesnake museum), browsing the artists' market, eating, and picture-taking.
We spent the whole morning in the old town...
We ended our vacation that evening with a dinner in a really nice restaurant in the old town (compensation for all our inadequate meals along the way), spent the last night in our motel, and the next morning flew back to Boston. If I had to do it again -- and I sure hope I will someday! -- I would probably break it into two separate vacations: one including Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Mesa Verde, and Pagosa Springs, the other with the caves and the white sands. But this one, even with all the driving around, was wonderful anyway!
