Desert lands of New Mexico

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I woke up in Santa Fe, New Mexico in Justin and Mel’s house – the people we met through couchsurfers. It was around 7am and the sun was rising outside, I’d had a decent sleep and spent most of the morning online, updating blogs and checking emails etc.
At around 10.30am we left their house, they had kindly let us stay there even whilst they went off to work and asked that we just lock the door behind us.
Our plan was to get something to eat, meet up with Jamie from the I-house and then drive to Chaco Canyon, an ancient ruins site.

By 12noon we were running late and had only just finished eating breakfast. We met up with Jamie shortly after in New Mexico, bought some memorabilia, took some photos and left Santa Fe promptly. We were advised by one of the shopkeepers to take a scenic drive down to Albuquerque through a ghost town called Madrid. Upon arriving in Madrid we were completely unimpressed by the “ghost town” as it didn’t really seem haunted in any respect.

We passed through and continued on to Albuquerque. We saw a wild coyote run across the road while we were driving which was nice. When we arrived in Albequerque, we realised that we weren’t going to have enough time to visit Chaco canyon as it was 3pm and a 3 hour drive away. Instead we stopped at a local national park and walked for about 10-15minutes before becoming bored and continuing the drive through New Mexico. It was a long drive; most of it spent talking and admiring the scenery around. We were driving through the old route 66 that we had spent most of our time on since we arrived in Oklahoma. We drove through the hills and mountainous terrain aiming to be near Monument Valley, Utah by night.
At around 9pm we arrived just outside Monument Valley and came to a dilemma as to where we were going to stay and what we were going to do.
We opted to drive on in the dark to Monument Valley. We approached a small lodge near Monument Valley. It was -7C so two of the six of us slept in a room in the lodge and the other four of us slept in the car. It wasn’t a great sleep and was so cold that the inside of the windows became frozen over with ice. I wasn’t feeling all that great and it was freezing cold but I was looking forward to what we were going to see the following day.

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