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Published: July 27th 2008
Continental Divide
Seeing the historical market, we stopped and took the opportunity to learn about the continental divide. On the way to Gallup, we'd seen signs for the Zuni Pueblo outside of town. Our handy AAA guidebook (even if your car never needs towing, a membership in AAA is worth it just for these handy guides!) said that this was a very worthwhile sight so we set out early in the morning to see if even though it wasn't in our plans. I was very interested in seeing an active pueblo and was pretty excited. We drove about 45 minutes out of the way to discover that on Sunday mornings, none of the tourist things were open. We even had to have protein bars and soy milk for breakfast as we couldn't find a cafe. However, we did see several Indian men dressed in full native dress on their way to a ceremony. We respected the wishes of the tribe and didn't take photos or interrupt but we were very curious what the ceremony was going to be. After a brief look around, we headed back to Gallup.
2. What is the definition of a pueblo? And what's adobe? Having been to one, we still weren't sure so we wanted to find out. Turns out, the definition is
Old brick buildings
We saw a lot of ruins along the old route it's the name of the centralized villages of the southwestern Native American villages. I was picturing the multifamily, muli-room stacked dwellings of elementary school history books which is what led to my confusion. Adobe is the mud and sand bricks some of these old buildings were made of.
Our goal was to drive as much of the old Route 66 as was feasible so Gabe had ordered a turn by turn hand-drawn map for each state. We knew that we were going to take a lot of the old Route 66 side roads so we only planned to go 310 miles (straight) that day. What we didn't realize was how long those side roads would take or how confusing some of the reroutes would be. In Albuquerque, we took several wrong turns - not even deliberately - in pursuit of a geocache we never found.
3. What makes something a fruit or vegetable? According to ScienceBob (a reliable source if I ever heard of one), if it has seeds in the part we eat, it's a fruit. So, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and many other things are technically fruits no matter where they're stored in the grocery store.
Red rocks..
There were some pretty spots that we saw on our out of the way route. The Sante Fe loop was MUCH longer and MUCH more confusing than we expected as well. We did get to see a lot more of northern New Mexico than we would have if we'd stayed on I-40. and we saw a lot of the Route 66 small towns and sights. I hate to admit, I was a bit disappointed with New Mexico. The areas we were in weren't as pretty as I'd imaginged they would be. I would like to do a weekend visit to Santa Fe someday, though, as the town was quite cute - just really hard to navigate! We made it to The Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, our overnight stop, pretty late - the famous neon was already turned off - and just collapsed into bed.
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