Santa Fe, New Mexico and Home

Our last destination was to re-visit with family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Traveling south from Denver, we had a little extra time so we took a detour to Taos. The road off of Interstate 80 was a mountain 2 lane road and getting stuck behind a slow moving vehicle is murder on time. The drive was beautiful, especially the drive around Eagle Landing Lake. We were making great time until there was a pretty severe auto accident on the 2 lane highway into Taos, so we drove around it (barely squeezing the Suburban around the smashed auto in the other lane) and we were stopped on the highway for about 45 minutes to let police and emergency personnel response to the accident. Needless the say we had very little time in Taos, enough to drive by Kit Carson house, have a great lunch at a place called LuLu's and head to Santa Fe. Kim was not happy about leaving a city where there was so much great artwork, pottery and such without getting a look.

We made it to Santa Fe later that afternoon after driving through a severe thunderstorm and lightning storm. We tried unsuccessfully to photograph the lightning but only got shots of the landscape.

We spent the evening with my cousins Rudy and Alicia telling them about our adventures on our trip. They were really interested about our time in Cincinnati because they lived in Wilmington and the towns were only about 1 hour away.

The next morning we headed out to Bandiler National Monument. It is an old pueblo Indian ruin where the Indians lived in the caves in the mountains with petrogylphs and the remains of a Kiva. (A Kiva is an underground structure the Indians used for religious ceremonies) The hi-light was the climb to a Indian dwelling higher up on the mountain. It required you to climb 4 different ladders (a total of 145 steps) and Keegan, Rudy and I were the only ones to attempt it. The view was spectacular and the cave sort of reminded me of a place that old west bank robbers would use to hide as the local sheriff and posse were chasing them.

My cousins were nice enough to take us to 2 more of Guy's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. We eat at Tecolate Cafe for Breakfast (unbelievable Huevos Rancheos and the Blue Corn Pancakes Kim had were also unbelievable.) We eat burgers for dinner at Bert's Burger Bowl. The Buffalo Burger I had huge. It was the size of my paper plate and it took everything in my power to put it away.

We turned in early because we were all ready to head home. The girls were missing the dogs, Kim was missing her bed and we were all tired of living out of the car for last 4 weeks. We decided to power out our drive home and go from Santa Fe to Wildomar (a little over 12 hours).
We agot up early (another 5:00am start) and pulled into our driveway at 5:57pm. No bad when you through in a stop for breakfast, a couple of bathroom breaks and we even pick up an hour when we crossed into Arizona.

Tomorrow, I will have a wrap-up of different things about the trip. All the unique things, we saw, did and heard on our trip.