Blogs from New Mexico, United States, North America - page 94

Day 2 in New Mexico was spent on a day trip to Taos. They say that of the 5,000 people in Taos, 1,000 are artists. We were on a pretty strict schedule so we were only able to step into a few galleries, but I made sure to hit up the local bookstore during lunch. Cody and I both really enjoyed Taos, it was a little bit Evergreen and a little bit La Junta. MORE PICTURES HAVE BEEN POSTED!... read more

Ancestral Puebloans Or “Oh no, not another Roman Ruin!” June 17 to Sun June 22 Why the subtitle for this piece? Well, when I was a child and my family lived in Turkey, this was a refrain my brother and I would chant, with a groan, when we stopped on our tour through western Turkey at places like Didyma and Miletus. Well - this was kind of what Max and Miles would say when they would ask “where are we going next?” and the rest of the conversation would go something like this: “We’re going to Mesa Verde.” “What’s there?” “Some really cool cliff dweller ruins, with ladders you can climb up to see them.” “Oh no, not more ruins.” However, that being said, each time we actually got to a place and they saw how ... read more

The drive from Texas to Raton, NM is incredible. Piper thinks that a mountain out the window looks like a volcano...turns out she's right. It's Mt. Capulin. There aren't a lot of places to stay in Raton, we are at the Holiday Inn Express. When I check in, they let me know there is a complimentary dinner for guests every night - potato soup and chili dogs tonight - and hot breakfast every morning. Cool! When I walk the dogs, housekeeping gets on their radios and soon I have a crowd on the patio admiring the dogs. Daily, they'd meet us on the patio after breakfast to visit with us. ... read more

On this overcast day, we headed out into the desert to see the Very Large Array of radio telescopes used to search the skies. This is the same array featured in the movie contact with Jodie Foster. It's a set of 27 radio antenna that are arranged in 3 branches of 9. When spread out, each arm can spread 13 miles. A rather reluctant PhD student took us out and answered all of our questions. It was really impressive to see these massive things, built decades ago, that we're still using. They're just now getting updated with new computers and systems so they were all clustered near the visitor's center. When they move, it's quite unsetlling. After a couple hours there, we headed back to Soccoro to resume our trip west. We stopped at the same ... read more

We got up early today because we had reservations for the 9:00 a.m. Left Hand Tunnel tour of Carlsbad Caverns. Our tour guide took us down into a less frequently used area with lanterns and answered a bunch of questions for us. Sam and Rece were more interested in this than most of the things on the trip. Sam asked lots of questions about the caves and what it was like to be a ranger. We spent a lot of time over in the Big Hall, too. It was fascinating. Gabe took lots of pictures but my camera won't capture anything in low light so I didn't try. We wandered about 1/2 way through and took the short cut out. All in all, we spent almost 4 hours underground - it was really fascinating. Once we ... read more