Blogs from Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, North America - page 21

We got up at a nice reasonable time this morning, 4.45am... Not!! And made our way to the Balloon Fiesta Park. This is because they have what is known as the 'Dawn Patrol' where a small selection of balloons go up early at dawn, ready to test the wind speed etc, for the day, and the general public can literally walk around them all as they get ready and leave. Then about 30-45 mins later the other balloons (about 700) get the go ahead from the Dawn Patrol and start preparing to leave too. We wandered around many of the balloons, watching as they lit up. By now it was about 8.30am and Keith & Nige needed some liquid refreshments so we made our way to the beer tent! We were back home by 10.30am and ... read more

So - We're getting later at leaving, 9.40am today! We drove out of Clinton (without my G-Star jacket - gutted!) towards towns like Elk City, Sayre etc, then into a town called Texola. A complete guess here but I think its maybe called Texola due to being on the Texas/Oklahoma border. Basically both were pretty much ghost towns and almost completely deserted. We stopped to take a picture of one of the two buildings in Texola which had 'No place like texola' painted across it. And that certainly proved to be true, Like yesterday, if you remember, we mentined about Katie becoming dog meat, well today it was almost all of us, When suddenly 9 (huge) well ok, tiny yappie dogs came hurtling towards us, Nige yet again in his wisdom thought this would be a ... read more

We slept in a bit today, which was nice. Even Ethan stayed asleep until after both Mom and I were showered and ready to go. Then we visited our third National Park, the Aztec Ruins (which have nothing to do with Aztecs of Mexico afterall...but that's another story), before we began the 2 1/2 hour drive to Albuquerque. It was a relatively short stop, but we got to walk around among the ruins and get a different experience than we had at Mesa Verde. Plus I got to use my new National Parks Annual Pass and bypass the admission price for all of us. Mom got a book. Ethan got a Junior Park Ranger Badge after completing a double sided assignment and got to observe a small lizard on a wall within the ruins. It was ... read more

What do you want to do today? We asked each other as we gathered ourselves in our hotel room. The trouble with a trip like this is that you have to accept early on that you aren't going to get to do everything you might want to do in the limited time you have in the various places. We knew we wanted to spend some time in Old Town, a nice area of shops and restaurants near our hotel. We also knew that we wanted to go to the Zoo, Aquarium, and Botanical Gardens. On the first day we decided to walk down to the aquarium and botanical gardens. As you'll see in the photos, both were pretty interesting. We really rushed through these, though, because we were too excited about the zoo (or at ... read more

(this is Megs) We've had a really great time being in Albuquerque for the past four days hanging out with Clare (my friend from Macalester) and all her friends. Getting here took us about a week from Vegas, with some pretty crazy climate changes from Vegas to here. First we left Vegas heading towards the Hoover Dam, which was pretty cool to see. They had recently sold tons and tons of water the California (water politics sure are complicated out here), so the river was really low and you could see the line where it was before. Then we started riding down I-93, and it got hot. Seriously hot. Like 110 degrees hot. I've never really been in the desert before, and my body was just not having it. We were drinking water like crazy, but ... read more