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Published: April 8th 2014
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The next part of our road trip takes us into Indian lands - Navajo, Hopi and Apache. We are looking for ancient ruins of Puebloan dwellings and some amazing sacred landscapes. First stop is the Navajo National Monument. With our hire car we got sat nav and duly entered this location. We were gaily following its instructions along increasingly small roads until we ended up at a tiny isolated trading post in the heart of Navajo country with nary a monument or brown sign in sight. BAD sat nav!! Furnished with directions from a suitably elder like Navajoan we headed all the way back to the highway swearing not to trust the sat nav alone and not to head off without reassuring brown signage!
The day featured visits to three parks. The Navajo national monument gives you an overlook of a canyon with ancient ruins of Navajo houses built into a shallow cavern. It is an exciting foreshadow of our visit to Mesa Verde the next day where we will see such ruins up close. The houses were built around 1200 AD.
The highlight for me was our second stop, Monument Valley. This park has stunning and mysterious buttes
which rise majestically from the surrounding desert. The viewing required an off road driving experience that online forums had warned against undertaking without a 4wd. We however are Australians and pshawed such warnings. Evan the rally driver extraordinaire adroitly overtook all the wussy 4WDs who tiptoed over the terrain because unlike a 4WD, a rental car actually can go anywhere! This valley will be familiar to fans of John Wayne movies as it was used for many of his Westerns. On our visit it was featuring in a South Korean sunscreen commercial!
Our final stop for the day was meant to be the four corners monument where you can stand in four states (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona) at once but sadly it was closed!
We pulled into the small Colorado town of Cortez and had dinner in a local Cheers style bar before an early night. Up in the morning and off to Mesa Verde to see cliff top dwellings built between 1200-1260 AD. A vertigo inducing mountain road took us to the top of a plateau and then a short walk found us right in amongst the ruins nestled under a shallow cliff top overhang.
The residents farmed on the plateau top then climbed back down to their multiple family dwellings using perilous hand holds carved into the cliff walls! Amazing and fascinating to see this history up close.
The final archaeological stop was the misnamed Aztec ruins in New Mexico which were actually native American and built in the 1200's AD. This site was a large walled community again inhabited by multiple families. The masonry was pretty impressive and reminded us of some of the sites we visited in Peru.
We spent a wonderful evening in Santa Fe which was a beautiful adobe style city centre featuring a Spanish Governors Palace which is the oldest public building in the USA. Best meal to date from my perspective included a server making guacamole at our table to our specifications (I chose cilantro, onion, chilli and tomatoes) - such a quintessential New Mexico experience - and the best tacos I have tasted (aside from Barbara's). Evan tried spicy bbq ribs and was in heaven.
A really long driving day saw us crossing New Mexico from Santa Fe to Roswell and ending in Carlsbad where we were to visit a huge cavern that you
reach by descending an elevator as deep as the empire state building is high! The cavern is massive around 40 football fields in area. Truly impressive. Katy picked up a lovely new friend - a dolly dressed as a park ranger that we have dubbed Rosie the Ranger and who is already a firm favourite. Just an aside about Roswell - this was a disappointingly normal American town which aside from the dodgy International UFO research centre and museum and occasional signs for alien themed beer or trinkets was kinda dull. We had hoped for lunch in a kitsch space themed diner or the like and instead had to settle for another chain restaurant meal. Oh well!
Back to Carlsbad - While their cavern is impressive, the town itself is just plain BAD. Happily forfeiting our pre paid motel room we kept driving an extra hour and a half to Pecos in Texas. This took us into oil country and into a town of oil men. Fortunately we found a great neighbourhood bar which still had the kitchen open and got some good old style Texan cooking (blackened catfish for Ev).
The road side landscape was dotted with
many small scale oil wells operating all hours. I must admit to being a bit surprised at how small the Texan oil fields were here. I always thought they would be on a much bigger scale. The wells are sitting on Earth and scrub.
Some observations: the speed limit of 75mph might sound low for a freeway until you figure out that is actually 120kmph!! and remember the steering wheel and everything else are all on the wrong side! Kudos to Evans driving over here. I had a go at driving when the roads of Pecos were near deserted and continually turned the wrong way! There are very few non chain restaurants Over here in small towns. This makes every town look the same and the chains are all serving broadly the same food So getting any variety is challenging. We are hoping the bigger cities will be different.
Travelling with a toddler makes you look for different qualities in an eating establishment. Maccas having an indoor playground is now very atractive! Having said that we have taken Katy to a couple of bars!
We are having a great time and Katy is a great travel buddy.
Hope you are all well too.
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