Albuquerque

Always heard of Albuquerque but have never been here, until now.  I have even committed the spelling of Albuquerque to memory.

There were a couple of things we wanted to do here.  One was a hike in the Petroglyphs area and the other was to check out old town Albuquerque.

So Wednesday morning we headed off to the Petroglyph National Monument.  The whole park area has lots of petroglyphs but we visited the Piedras Marcadas Canyon section which has 5000!  These were left both by the native Indian tribes and by Spanish explorers and settlers of the area.

This roadrunner was out to see them too.

I didn’t take photos of all 5000...are you disappointed?  But here are a couple.

This one kind of reminds me of “Wilson” on Cast Away.

The rock is black basalt (lava rock) formed a very long time ago.  Much of this part of New Mexico is covered in it.  I noticed it while driving on Tuesday as well.

Finger painting?

Very neat area to visit - and got some hiking in too.

We went back to our RV to have lunch with Tibby and decided to go into town and have dinner there in the old town.  So we left around 2 pm to go there.

This is how you pay for parking...

Yeah - put your cash in the little slot for your parking spot number.  Effective.

The old town has a very Spanish/Mexican flair, of course.

We did a multi geocache here called “Old Town Ghost Tour” which we did because it visited old buildings that we would not normally have visited without a tour guide.  It was a neat way of seeing them and getting a short rundown on the building itself, and why it’s allegedly haunted.

This is called “The Lady of the Tree”.  I’m not sure of the actual story behind it, but it was interesting.  The original tree which it is in was hit by lightning, so they cut it and moved it here in front of the church.  It’s just sitting on another tree stump in the corner.  Weird, eh?

We also visited the church called San Felipe de Neri, the oldest in Albuquerque.

We had dinner (Mexican fare) at Church St Cafe in the oldest building, called Casa de Ruiz, inhabited by the Ruiz family, of course, from the time of Albuquerque’s settlement.  And the food was excellent as well...so were the Margueritas.

                   

We left Albuquerque yesterday morning (Thursday) and travelled through the rest of New Mexico and into the Texas panhandle.

Now we’re on Central time...getting closer.  We’ve had 2 time changes in the last 3 days because Arizona does not change to daylight savings time.  So we’re going to bed later and getting up later.  Not good when we want to get an early start.  Oh well, we have nothing else to do.

At our RV park just outside of Amarillo, Texas, they had these alpacas (I’m guessing) and emu.  They posed for me.

         

So today we left Texas and wandered into Oklahoma.  I think this photo was still in Texas.  Ummm...leaning tower of Britten?

We stopped for lunch at a pullout/picnic area.  Our RV and truck - still in good shape!

So today we stopped at Shawnee, Oklahoma, for the night.  It’s not far from OKC.  And the weather is cooperating beautifully...so far.  We leave here in the morning and head down to Little Rock, Arkansas.