Southwest Adventure

Danny flew in to Albuquerque to meet us on Thursday night and we took off for a family roadtrip through the southwest on Friday. My parents joined us for the first leg, before catching their plane out Sunday morning, while we continued on for another day and a half.

Now, what better way to kick off our trip through the Land of No Water than with a gratuitous water montage? Seriously, though, this was Jack's first real introduction to swimming pools, and he was a big fan. You can't tell from these photos because the sun was too bright. But he put his frog kick to work and would squeal with delight at the splashes it produced. I think he went swimming every day on this trip, even during the conference, when my mom was alone with him and would have to take him all by herself. He loved it that much. I don't really have that much more to say about this, I just wanted to include these photos because they're cute.



So we started off northward from Albuquerque, which is fun to say and even more fun to spell but is not my favorite place in New Mexico. It's kind of a sprawling, smoggy city. We were happy to leave it behind, and were astonished how barren it looked when we returned to it after seeing some of the more lush country to the north of it. We headed first to Santa Fe, which is not much bigger than Roseville, Minnesota, but is ever so much more a destination. (You can tell by the airline maps that list "ABQ" as "Santa Fe Area.") It is adorable, I'm not going to lie. I could live there, I think. I know it's silly to be taken in by the tourist traps, but it wasn't touristy the way Fisherman's Wharf or Cannery Row are. It felt very much like a different country, with its broad plazas and its stucco and its sandstone. We kept snickering over the faux motto "New Mexico: not really new, not really Mexico" but in actuality it felt more like Mexico than Mexico does. Or it captured more of the essence of what I imagine Mexico to be like than the places I've actually been in Mexico. I loved it. But it was on to Taos, which was even more adorable, if possible. Probably too adorable for its own good. Lots of galleries, lots of ways to spend lots of money. We bought $15 goat cheese, which is more than goat cheese should be allowed to cost, but it was made from New Mexican goats that foraged on wild New Mexican forage and there was green chile oil mixed in and it was delicious. And we enjoyed it on some Navajo fry-bread the next day for a very unusual and expensive picnic.

After that we dropped my parents off (Bye Mom and Dad! We miss you! Jack misses you! So much!!!) and headed west, and still north, to Farmington, which was our jumping off point for Ship Rock, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, and Aztec. I think that was all of it. Ship Rock was an eerie and beautiful monolith sticking out of the desert like a sore thumb (but not The Thumb, another rock formation, another 25 miles west, which we skipped). It was, out there in the middle of nowhere, vastly superior to the town that bore its name, which was one of the more depressing places I have ever seen. In general, this northern country was more scrub/steppe and less desert, but this particular spot was desolate. Trailer parks and trash blowing through vacant lots, and not a speck of shade, not a green thing growing, just sun baking the old tires and broken glass into the asphalt. We drove by a woman taking her baby for a walk in that godforsaken landscape and my heart hurt a little, to think that this was what that baby would call home. But people make it everywhere, don't they. Onto Four Corners, which was really just a brief stop so we could add three more states to the growing list of Jack's travels and pick up some Navajo frybread. Then onto Mesa Verde, Jack's first national park. We had our fancy picnic at Cliff Palace, not actually overlooking it as I had envisioned, but a nice spot in the shade nonetheless. And then we went and looked out over the Pueblo ruins and decided it was okay we hadn't paid for a tour because the tour involved 15 ladders, which would be tricky to navigate with a baby. The drive there and back was worth the price of admission alone, rolling hills of pinyon (I lack an en-yay on this keyboard) giving way to ponderosa, really beautiful country. They had had a fire recently, though, so some parts were still scorched, with blackened trees left standing, leading Danny to remark "Mesa Verde? More like Mesa Muerte!" Which, maybe you had to be there for, but I thought was the funniest thing on the whole dang trip. We continued driving through Colorado, and from Mesa Verde eastward was a completely different ecosystem, not even a hint of desert, vibrant greens as far as you could see-- I would not have believed that no man's land was just on the other side of those hills if I hadn't just driven through it myself. We skipped what was the assuredly adorable historic downtown Durango so that we would make it to Aztec before it closed. And we made it with half an hour to spare, which was just enough time to take the self-guided tour through the ruins, which we decided was a lot like what Cliff Palace would've been like, but with fewer (which is to say, no) ladders. Of course, Aztec was not made by the Aztecs, but by the Pueblos, but they didn't know that when they named it Aztec. Obviously. We romped through the ruins, reading about the archeologists' best guess as to what different structures were for, and even got to see the inside of a reconstructed Great Kiva, where they used to go and pray or get high or maybe a little of both.

And that was the end. Jack was a dream in the car and the plane and we know we are so so lucky to have such a cooperative fellow traveler. We look forward to many more family adventures before Jack wises up to the fact that he doesn't always have to be so cooperative.