Riding Off Into the Sunrise

We can't be riding off into the sunset, because we are heading home... East.  Our last several days involved travels in Mesa Verde, which was AWESOME.  I took photos of cows crossing the road in the Natl. Park and photos of the ruins there.  So gorgeous.  Really, go there as soon as you can!  Doc and I have been successful in planning the route for his newest trip class, Southern Rockies Field Studies.  Look for it next Mayterm at Saint Francis.  We plotted out how long parts of the route will take and also which places have group camping.  It should be a good time for the students who get to go.  So we're hanging up our hats for a month and a half starting tomorrow.  Catch us next time in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana.

Tumbleweeds

This has, literally, been a whirlwind couple of days.  Not only because we have been in high wind areas, but also because we've packed a lot of activities into a few days.  Since my last update, we have been to Bandelier National Monument, Canyon De Chelly National Monument, and Mesa Verde National Park.  Our last stop is set to be Great Sand Dunes National Park, but anyone watching the US news very closely knows that it will only be open for business tomorrow if the Federal Budget gets passed.  Crossing fingers! Anyway, this has really been an Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan if we are wanting to be more hip) ruins trip.  Our first sightings were at Bandelier, where we marveled at the complexity of the structures and the sheer number of intact walls and structures.  Now that seems laughable.  It just kept getting better and more impressive the further we trucked on.  Canyon De Chelly is gorgeous, with or without ruins, but it definitely had more and even more complete examples than Bandelier.  There was also a coffee shop run by a Navajo woman in the boundaries of the monument called Changing Woman Coffee.  If you ever get to that park, you MUST GO!  She was such a trip.  She even fist-bumped me over the top of the counter.  Hysterical!  Anyway, Canyon De Chelly led to a stop at the Four Corners.  Pretty cheezy photo op, but worth the stop to talk to some Navajo artisans selling their wares.  In Canyon De Chelly I bought a Snowflake Obsidian necklace for myself, and I've purchased a few gifts for people.  In addition to local craftspeople, the last few days have also brought a crazy amount and variety of dogs, horses, and cows running around seemingly wild near the roads and sometimes right off the trails.  We've been informed that some of the horses are feral and owned by the Navajo, but the dogs just seem to be friendly neighborhood mutts.  We even watched one of the dogs steal a bag of chips right out of our neighbor's campsite at Canyon De Chelly!  So funny.  All they found was the empty bag and a happy looking canine wagging his tail.  Today we toured around Mesa Verde NP and we were certainly in for some surprises!  Half the park is closed for the season, but there were still more ruins than we'd seen at either Bandelier or Canyon De Chelly, and you could get even closer to them.  So cool.  Still haven't downloaded photos from today, so you'll have to check back and see those in a few days.  Call it a cliffhanger.

Don't Mess With Texas

So everything in Texas is supposed to be the biggest and the best, but I'm beginning to think "ya'll" are a bunch of liars.  Seriously, every place we went that was supposed to take us 5 hours took us closer to 7 (driving the speed limit or a bit over in major cop country) and the words "Santa Fe will be blistering hot" are beginning to rub me the wrong way.  Especially considering I'm about 35 miles down the road and it was 60, overcast, and 30 mph winds in the middle of the afternoon.  Also, they claim it's sunny 340 days of the year and I just happen to be here on 2/25 that aren't?  COME ON!!!

So here's where we've been and what we've been doing... after driving thru Oklahoma to get to Dallas, we stopped a few miles away from the border to eat lunch in a tiny town called Caddo, OK.  Apparently they used to have buffalo walk right down the main street!  Anyway, for an itty bitty place it certainly had some fabulous barbeque and all the small-town charm you could cram in.  The lady who owned the cafe directed us to the 5-and-Dime which we just HAD to visit, according to her.  Glad we did, too, because it was one of the neatest old hardware stores either Doc or I had ever visited and the woman who ran it had hand-painted the almost 1,000 ceiling tiles in the store to restore it to its original splendor.  In turn, she directed us to their town museum and library saying, "It's free, so it's well worth it!"  The museum probably housed every item that anyone in the town of Caddo has ever owned, and the walls were lined with photos of goodness knew who, but Doc and I got a guided tour by the sweetest little old lady you'll ever meet.  When everything was said and done, we spent about an hour in a town that takes 5 seconds to drive through.

After we got to Dallas, we spent a lovely couple of days with my great aunt and uncle, which was a real treat.  I got to re-meet my Dad's cousins and meet their children for the first time.  Completely delightful. Also managed to make it to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Trammel Crow Asian Art Museum.  Both are must-sees if you are in the Dallas area and consider yourself to be an art enthusiast.  They had the least Euro and Americentric collection of art I've ever seen.  They had whole wings devoted to South American, African, Asian, and Pacific Island arts.  So cool.

Post-Dallas we headed towards Amarillo, where we intended to have dinner with friends and stay in Paloduro Canyon to check it out as a stop for the new field studies course.  The word Paloduro shall henceforth only be used as a swear word in my vocabulary.  Dinner was great, and the canyon was pretty, don't get me wrong, but at what cost???  It was so windy all night (minimum of 30 mph with 50+ mph gusts) that Doc had a sprinkling of red dust from the canyon floor all thru his tent (despite having his rain fly on) and I had 1/4 inch drifts on my face (without the rain fly)!  Long story (read that as LONG NIGHT) short, I spent a restless first 4 hours of the night and then transferred to the van, where I at least didn't have to get up and get a drink of water every half hour after swallowing dust.  Grr does not even begin to cover our level of frustration or our lack of sleep.  We toured the canyon this morning and then headed Westward for the next adventure, New Mexico.  The photos are all Paloduro except for the last two, which are historic route 66 totally abandoned.  Sorry for the long post to catch you up, but it only makes sense that my chronicle of a big state would be long-winded, right?