New Mexico Travels

Our trail led us north through the wilds of New Mexico.  On our way to the first stop, we delayed a little while in famous Roswell, New Mexico.  This is the town that has taken full advantage of its reputation as Alien Central.  There was a whole section of main street devoted to alien gift shops and tourist stuff.  There was a UFO Museum, inflatable alien dolls, the whole nine yards.  We stopped for lunch but resisted the urge to load up on alien tchotchkes.  We also stopped at the Smokey the Bear statue along the highway.  It turns out that Smokey the Bear was a real bear cub who was rescued, partly burned, from a Lincoln National Forest fire in the area, and whose story launched much of the Prevent Forest Fires movement.  Who knew?

Our first layover was in the town of Carrizozo, where we took up residence in the Valley of Fire Recreation Area.  This was a lovely campground in the middle of a lava field that was formed as lava oozed out of the earth eons ago.  The campground had the most spacious bathroom and showers that we have ever seen in a campground and was very reasonably priced with sites that had a dramatic view of the desert around the town.  Carrizozo has a history as a movie set town, dating back to 1923, when Eric von Stroheim apparently made a film in the town.  The local film buffs keep track of the films made in the area and in New Mexico, and one night while we were there, a group of them put on a showing of an old western that had been made there.  We were able to attend also and thoroughly enjoyed the showing, set up in an improvised theater in the community hall.

While in Carrizozo, we took a car trip down the road to White Sands to see the famous National Monument.  On the way we stopped at the Three Rivers Petroglyph site, home of over 20,000 petroglyph drawings made by the ancient peoples who inhabited this area thousands of years ago.  The trip also offered some pistachio nut groves, where we loaded up on fresh pistachios for ourselves and a few bags to mail to friends.  Best was the National Monument itself.  We took the auto tour and climbed the blinding white sand dunes, then took a guided walk through some natural areas where the dunes are still advancing.

There were some dramatic windstorms while we were in Carrizozo, and our campsite up on a hill was quite exposed to them.  We wound up staying an extra day because of forty mile per hour winds all day with gusts of sixty or more.  That kind of weather is not good for RV's, as they blow around a lot more than a passenger car.    So we hunkered down and waited for the winds to die down.  Fortunately, they eventually did, and we were able to move on to Albuquerque.

Our RV park in the Albuquerque area was right on the old Route 66, which is prominently labeled in the town and provides a lot of local cachet.  Our RV park used to be an old trading post along the route and has been expanded to an RV park which also provides some vintage RVs and some historical gossip and trivia.  The town itself provided some resources for us after our long stay in such remote areas.  We found a good organic food store, I was able to get some medical tests done, we picked up mail, and we got some repairs done on the RV steps, which had been giving us trouble the whole trip.

But it certainly wasn't all business.  Albuquerque is located right on the Rio Grande and there are some great bike paths and parks all along the river.  They've left the area pretty much wild cottonwood forests like the environment years ago, and there are some nature centers that provide information and advice about how to find the critters and the birds.  I took a long bike ride along those trails and had a great time.

Ivy enjoyed the Old Town and took advantage of it to do some painting.  It's a very historic area, with lovely old adobe buildings, a nice public square, and of course, lots and lots of shopping.  We also had a couple of restaurant meals near there, emphasizing Mexican cuisine.

From here we headed north to the Santa Fe area.  We got an RV park in the town of Pojoaque, just north of Santa Fe, and used it as a base for side trips to both Santa Fe and Taos.  Much of the land in this area is reservation land, so there are casinos pretty much everywhere, some truly gigantic in size. 

We were much more interested in the string of  pueblos that had been built by the Spanish and the Indians over hundreds of years.  The oldest one, in Taos, still maintains a section devoted to keeping the practices of the old pueblos alive.  They have no electricity and no running water in this section, which is the oldest continually inhabited pueblo going.

Taos is an amazing town, and we loved it.  We paid a visit to some of the local historical sites and museums, including the Millicent Rogers Museum, which houses her collection of turquoise and silver, as well as some wonderful pottery work from Native American sources.  We visited the famous church of St Francis of Assissi in the center of town, and explored the streets and byways. 

Santa Fe got a bit less attention, but we found that we enjoyed it a lot more than we had expected.  There is a very good feel to the town once you are not in the most touristy section, and the people are very cultured and friendly.  There is so much history here that you can learn a lot about the area while enjoying a very civilized city.  We found a great pizza place, which did a lot to put us in a good mood, since good pizza has been a rare find. But the best was Museum Hill, an area that has been developed into an elaborate complex of museums located on a local high point with great views.  Our favorite of all of them was the Museum of Folk Art, an amazing complex of exhibits base on a collection of folk creations from all over the world.  The exhibits were absolutely brilliant, arranging sometimes hundreds of different pieces in large, complex "cities" or "villages" that showcased the work while placing it in a unique context.  What a place!

We took a day trip to the Bandelier National Monument, near Los Alamos.  One of the ancestral pueblo settlements in the area, it has a unique environment of cliff dwellings made of "tuff", a volcanic material that is easy to work and develops elaborate swiss cheese look from erosion.  Natives used it to build their dwellings, but also hollowed out rooms in the cliffs for storage or additional living arrangements.  We ran into lots of kids doing school trips here, and we had to admire the adults who were constantly busy keeping the little urchins from getting into trouble. 

Leaving this area, we headed west and stopped briefly at the Bluewater Lake State Park in Prewitt, New Mexico.  Once again, a great little state park in the middle of a vast desert, not very populated. We took a car trip to the El Morro National Monument, site of the Signature Rock, where travelers for centuries engraved their names as they passed through.  Here also we got our first view of the white-throated swift, a bird of high cliffs and canyons.  They are billed as among North America's fastest birds, with speeds up to 200 miles an hour.  We climbed the trail leading to the top of the cliffs, which gave me some trouble but we got down fine and had some great views from the top.

From here we are headed to Arizona and the Grand Canyon, a goal from the very beginning of the trip.