Green Chile and Pine Nuts!

thurs | fri | sat | sun | mon | tues | wed | thurs2 | fri2 | sat2

As we left arizona and crossed into new mexico, the terrain was becoming more mountainous. Soon enough, we had reached the continental divide! A good place for a quick stop and of course, a picture. (Find out more about the divide here.) In a couple of hours we were in downtown albuquerque, which coincidentally, was celebrating its tricentennial. We decided to head straight for the sandia peak tramway and have dinner overlooking the city. The line was pretty long from all the balloon fiesta tourists in town (including us!). But we made it to the top and ate at the bar in the high finance restaurant. I had shrimp cocktail, some nachos, and some interesting local brews. At 10,378 feet, this restaurant is the highest full service restaurant in north america!

day 3: saturday, october 14 — 140 miles
Early to rise! Today we had to make it over to the balloon fiesta park for the morning launch. Getting there late was not an option! Luckily, it wasn’t too far away. We had purchased tickets online for a bus shuttle parking lot, which got us to the park pretty smoothly. (Leaving was another story: The organizers of this fiasco should take a course in crowd management. Everyone leaves the park at once, but the lines for different parking lots all merged together, no one was sure they’re in the right line, the buses all come into a giant cul-de-sac and have to back out to get on the road, with buses waiting for other buses to back up, etc. Just a total disaster!)

The balloons themselves were very cool! You can walk around pretty much anywhere, mingle with the people setting up the launches, and even get bumped as a balloon inflates (see my balloon fiesta pics). We grabbed some breakfast here too, and I tried the green chile breakfast burrito (see my southwest food pics)! The souvenir setup was also a mess. Unlike say a golf tournament, where you can look over the merchandise and then take it to a cashier, here you first stand in line to get to the cashier and then decide what merchandise you wanted (which was displayed behind the cashier). As you might suspect, every single customer buying a shirt says “can I see the shirt (for sizing)”. Duh! Delay, delay, delay! To top it off, if you wanted a shirt and maybe a poster, uh, the posters and non-clothing merchandise were sold in another tent! To think they were celebrating 35 years of ballooning. You think someone would have a clue.

After a quick snack, we headed north toward santa fe. But first we would bypass the city and head even higher into the remote mountains over to los alamos and the bradbury science museum. This was a nice, interactive museum where you get to play with radioactive stuff, set off geiger counters, and other fun things. There was also a short film about the secrecy surrounding “the town that never was” and some models of little boy and fat man. After leaving the museum, we had lunch at a sonic drive-in nearby (I love sonic!) The whole town had a small town, 50's feel to it. It would have been nice to spend more time here.

But this trip was about driving! We headed down the mountains back toward santa fe. A quick stop for a tasting at the santa fe vineyards resulted in a purchase of 3 bottles. Finally, we made it to santa fe in time to check out the capitol building (the only round capitol in the 50 states), hear mass at the basilica of st. francis of assisi, and then have dinner at la plazuela in the la fonda hotel (another harvey house!). The old town area in downtown santa fe is very cool (see my around NM pics), with lots of restaurants and stores all along the old santa fe trail. But again, this was a one night stop.

day 4: sunday, october 15 — 465 miles
We had actually scaled back our driving the day before, crossing taos off the list, to save up some energy for today. This was gonna be the bear! We had a quick breakfast and headed out on a roundabout drive toward four corners, avoiding the mountain roads (which can be slow going with twists, turns, and maybe an RV in front of you!). About two-thirds of the way there at 10 AM, we stopped for some pie and coffee at the triangle cafe in bloomfield. I made a wrong turn at shiprock and lost about a half hour heading in the wrong direction. Finally, we made it to four corners. This area is actually on indian land and is run by the navajo and ute tribes. We took the obligatory pictures of standing on all four states (here's a pic of me doing it), ordered up some navajo fry bread (sorta like a funnel cake — see my pic) and headed northeast into colorado . . .