RV'ing: NM

Showing posts with label NM. Show all posts

6-10-09 Wednesday (Tenting at a Monument)

Being what felt like, terrible parents, we dropped Dasher off at the Petsmart PetsHotel again. We had quite a day planned.

Our first destination was the Tinkertown Museum in the town of Sandia Park. This place is just wacky. It’s something this guy decided to make out of junk laying around. Web excerpt:

“…miniature wood-carved figures were first part of a traveling exhibit, driven to county fairs and carnivals in the 1960s and '70s. Today over 50,000 glass bottles form rambling walls that surround a 22-room museum. Wagon wheels, old fashioned store fronts, and wacky western memorabilia make Tinkertown's exterior as much as a museum as the wonders within.”

Above: A video showing just one of the many displays in this museum.

Tinkertown had a lot of those very old arcade style machines. Most of which you drop a quarter in and watch some silly thing move. We decided to try Esmeralda, the fortune teller. The card/fortune that came out had to do with sleeping too much. Aside for an explanation, here’s a poem it printed:

Do you like to lay in bed,

Just to rest your sleepy head -

That’s OK for a day or two,

But as a habit, ‘twill never do.

Fun stuff. Jim and I had just talked about our sleeping habits yesterday. We sleep over 8 hours a day. We discussed it being a habit that we’ll soon need to break once we return to reality. {Cue Twilight Zone Music} Coincidence? Hmmmmm

After junk browsing, we went to the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. That’s a mouthful. I love this place. It was so pretty. Here’s a few of my favorite photos:

Here’s a bunch of videos:

Above: What some of the hike was like.

Above: We made it to the top! Checkout this 360. It was so worth it!

Above: My slideshow of today’s photos. Gorgeous stuff!

6-9-09 Tuesday (The Hotel Stay)

There’s nothing like starting a morning out by having some blood drawn. Maybe it’s the big needle, perhaps it’s the way the blood looks in the fluorescent lighting. Not like I look anyway. I had my blood drawn by Quest Diagnostics on that uninsured patient program they have going. I’d link to that information but I’ve already done that in a prior entry so if you want more information, search the blog for it. I can’t do everything for you. The blood sample was easy; the paperwork seemed complex. Whatever.

We took Dasher to Petsmart’s PetsHotel. It’s basically a kenneling service and they make it fancy, downright cute and very affordable! I felt better about kenneling him this time than the time we left him over night in South Carolina. Here’s some pictures:

Above: Click on the pictures to see a larger size so you can read the plaque.

Above: A private suite has a TV too!

An almost 2 hour drive to Bandelier National Monument was well worth the time. It was a rock and Indian trip once again. I love the rocks here. They were formed with soft and hard rock mixed. Softer rock washed away, creating a Swiss cheese effect in the rock. We’ve seen this before in other areas of the country but I never get tired of it’s unique beauty. Aside from the rocks, there’s cliff dwellings, pueblos and some petroglyphs.

Above: A walk through on art of the trail.

Our next stop was to the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos. Los Alamos is where the atomic bomb was created. The most interesting thing is that in the 1940’s, this city was created so that scientists who were once scattered across the world could come together and research. Very few knew of Los Alamos. It’s mailing address was a PO Box in Santa Fe. Mail was checked going out and coming in for security leaks. The city was a big secret and housed thousands of employees. This city is still active by Los Alamos National Laboratory. The creepiness was going through checkpoints to enter/exit the city even though it’s a “normal” city of fast food joints, gas stations, card shops, etc.

6-8-09 Monday (Icy Lava Stuff)

For something a little different today, we thought we’d go see a cave. Seriously. Off to the Ice Cave we went. It was about a hour drive each way. If we had to do it all over again, we wouldn’t have bothered. We can’t go into the cave, nor could we fit anyway. It was more of a cave opening with a frozen pond in it. I’ll start from the beginning. We arrive. It’s a privately owned tourist attraction. The property has a lot of old buildings on it; some even appear derelict. We went into the gift shop, greeted by a very upbeat lady who started explaining the trails before we even got up to her. $10.00 to see the Bandera Volcano site and the Ice Cave. Up the 1 mile round trip trail we went. It was OK. It was like a giant ditch. The property all around has tons of interesting lava rock all over the place. It was similar to our visit to Craters of the Moon. In fact, that’s how the Ice Cave was formed was from a lava tube. After the volcanic site, we walked another trail to the cave. About 3/4 of the way down the steps, you can feel the warm air change to frigid. Now that was neat. I even walked up and down a few steps to marvel at the temperature change. Warm air to walk in cooler. Remarkable.

My disappointment was that there were no icicles hanging like brochure depicted. Maybe that’s only certain times of the year or maybe that wasn’t even the cave in the picture. I also thought we’d be able to go inside of it more. If it wasn’t deep enough to go into then how about some lights deeper into it so we can see “more” of it. Hey you asked, so there it is. Oh, Jim just said you didn’t ask. My bad.