Blogs from New Mexico, United States, North America - page 15

Santa Fe has been voted by most publications the like of Travel & Leisure or CondeNast Traveler as a top 3 place to live or to visit in States. This has not gone for two or three years, but rather for over the last 20 years. Santa Fe seems to be "the place", and still, I don't have many international friends who visited the place. So we made it to Santa Fe. The city being so much hip has his disadvantage too...hotels here are not cheap at all. So we never slept in Santa Fe. It's not a big issue as it is only a short drive from Albuquerque. I wanted to do some of the historic Route 66. But guess what, the historic route here is not anymore, it has been replaced by a solid ... read more

We are starting to get the hang of this camping thing. We are now quick to set up and quick to pack up our site. This morning, a devastating thing happened to me...I DROPPED and SMASHED my coffee pot. After only 4 uses! Looks like I will need to make a Wally-World stop today! Before setting back on the road, we took a quick stop at the Cherokee trading post outside our campsite. They had a mix of manufactured and genuine Native American made goods. I picked up something for my favorite little nugget! Then we got back on the road to continue our trek westward. This stretch of highway is very exciting for me. It follows parts of Old Route 66 which as I mentioned before has lots of fun little tourist traps. Our first ... read more

We had a great day in Cloudcroft today. It started with breakfast at the Western Cafe, shopping along Main St., and a quick stop at the ranger station to pick up information about places to hike. While we were at the ranger station it started raining and hailing like crazy. Which actually was great timing because I was ready for a nap! There is no rain in the forecast for tomorrow so we're planning a morning hike on the Osha Trail and a trip to Ruidoso for dinner. ... read more

Today we drove from Austin, TX to Santa Fe, NM. We drove 686 miles which took about 10-1/2 hours. The best part about the drive was seeing a field of sunflowers and stopping to take pictures. The worst part about the drive was being sleepy because we only got about 3 hours of sleep. When we arrived in Santa Fe the first thing we did was change clothes and set off to explore. We visited downtown Santa Fe and walked all around downtown and visited the galleries on Canyon Road. We ate terrific Japanse food at Izanami. Izanami is an amazing restaurant located adjacent to the Santa Fe National Forest at the beautiful Ten Thousand Waves Spa. Tomorrow we're looking forward to getting to Colorado and spending some time outdoors.... read more

I collected some numbers about our trip - there is nothing like a number to give you confidence that you know what you are talking about. 84 - Total number of Days on the Road, exactly 12 weeks. 9211 - That's the total number of miles driven from the time we left our driveway to the time we got back to it. I estimated 7000 before we started, but it turned out a lot more than that. I guess we did more driving around towns and to and from campsites. Hard to know exactly how much of that was pulling the trailer, but I'm estimating we put about 5000 miles on the trailer tires! 11.0 - that's my overall mpg on the Land Cruiser. Not exactly a big number. There were times, towing up a mountain ... read more