We’ve had a nice time voyaging through northern New Mexico on our way to Denver.  From our overnight campsite at El Malpais National Monument, we’ve continued pursuing scenic routes as much as possible, and it has been a very nice change from the Interstate.

Although our initial impression of Joe Skeen campground was not great because we arrived in the dark to a seriously un-level site, we woke up to an entirely different place.  This time of year it’s beautiful in every direction, with little hills and green foliage arranged almost as if someone planned the place to look that way, and very peaceful.

I found I had left the rear compartment open all night, with the light on.  This explained how we managed to use up 38 amp-hours of power in one night (the compartment light is not yet LED).  The light attracted a party of moths, who were all sleeping in the compartment the next morning.  I chased several dozen of them out and even a couple of days later a moth or two flutters out of the compartment every time I open it.

Driving to Albuquerque, we made a stop at Petroglyph National Monument.  There’s RV parking, a nice visitor center, and just two miles further there are some short walks in the area called Boca Niegra where you can see dozens of interesting petroglyphs chipped into the black volcanic basalt.  We spent an hour there and then continued north to Las Alamos and our destination, Bandelier National Monument.  This meant we managed to visit three National Park sites in one day.

The specter of the “Atomic City,” Las Alamos, is obvious when you come to Bandelier. Along the twisting entry road we passed a few Los Alamos National Laboratory sites, tucked into canyons and atop mesas, each one fenced off and featuring a bunch of scientific-looking objects and warning signs.  But the real feature is the dramatic canyons of pink volcanic tuff, riddled with Swiss cheese holes from wind erosion.  These holes are sometimes large enough to form small dwellings, which were used by the Ancient Puebloans as the basis for their cliff houses.

Bandelier’s visitor center sits in the bottom of Frijoles canyon, which also holds the remains of a large pueblo and numerous cliff houses.  Unfortunately, the same river that attracted native residents for centuries has also threatened the visitor center, and currently you can’t drive down there.  All visitors (except, apparently motorcyclists) must come by shuttle bus.  If you are staying in the Juniper campground at the park, you catch the shuttle about 1/4 mile from the campground.  A short trail leads from the visitor center to the pueblo ruins, kivas, and cliff houses, along with some petroglyphs and one very nice pictograph.

Connectivity in northern New Mexico has been hit or miss for me.  I was able to send and receive text messages and email on my phone, but Internet access via the Cradlepoint/Verizon card was hopeless.  Voice phone calls worked only at the dump station.  That was fine with me, since I wasn’t there to do a lot of work.

We considered hiking from the campground the next morning via the Frey Trail down to the visitor center (2.0 miles) and then catching the shuttle back up, but with all the other things we wanted to see along our driving route it seemed best just to make an early start of the day.  Bandelier will go on our list of places that deserve a second, lengthier, visit.

The drive north toward Taos brought us up the Rio Grande River Gorge, along Route 68.  This is a great drive through part of the 82-mile long river gorge, and there is a small visitor center along the route.  With all the pauses we made, it was lunchtime when we finally reached Taos, and we’d gone only 73 miles.  We took 90 minute to wander the downtown (loaded with art galleries and curio shops, very touristy), and then got serious about covering some miles.

Fortunately, from Taos to Rt 160 in southern Colorado there aren’t many temptations.  The land becomes wide open with great vistas to scattered mountains, but there’s little to stop for.  A few hours later we were at Rt 160 and decided to keep going east through the La Veta Pass (9,500 feet) to make Colorado Springs by dinnertime.

I think normally we would have stopped sooner, but we knew that Emma’s friend from Alumapalooza (Kathryn) was camped at Cheyenne Mountain State Park.  Also, we realized that a night at this great state park would give us our only full-hookup night in about three weeks of traveling.  That’s an opportunity to do a few things that consume lots of water, so we went for it and managed to pull in by about 6 p.m.

Our night here has been great.  The girls had a sleepover in our trailer, which was our way of pre-paying Kathryns parents for what will undoubtedly be five days of kid-wrangling while Eleanor and I are busy with Alumafandango.  The girls are easy to have around and entirely self-entertaining, so while they are doing their thing we’re taking the opportunity to catch up on laundry and email and such things. This afternoon we will relocate to Wheat Ridge (the town next to Lakeside, about 90 miles away) to prep for Alumafandango over the weekend.

I think this may be a record for us: three postponements of the same trip.  First we were going to leave Tucson on August 2, and enjoy a glorious couple of weeks exploring Utah and Colorado before Alumafandango began on August 21.  Then, when it became obvious work wasn’t going to allow me to go that early, we postponed to August 8, which quickly became August 9.  And then we realized we were far too deep into too many projects, and the trip slipped again to August 14.

As you might guess, this has meant re-writing the trip plan several times.  Now, instead of going up to Utah and visiting Navajo National Monument, Canyonlands, and Dinosaur National Monument, we are going up through New Mexico on a quicker route.  But here’s the ironic bit:  the trip has actually gotten better in some ways.

Maybe I’m just looking at the glass as 30% full, but I see a very relaxing (although short) trip through some interesting parts of New Mexico that we haven’t seen before. Instead of a lot of boring Interstate, we’ll get a chance to roam up AZ Rt 191 (part of it, not the “Devil’s Highway” portion), AZ-NM Rt 78, and NM Rt 180.  All of these are great scenic roads.

When we go out on a new trip, I like spending the first night somewhere boondocky, with no hookups and few people.  It’s usually the easiest night to be self-reliant, since our batteries are fully charged and we have lots of water and fuel.  Plus, I just hate paying campgrounds the first night of a trip.  The fee for a campground is always more palatable when you need their amenities to replenish your systems.  So, if we make it that far, our first night will be at a remote free boondock site near El Malpais National Monument in northern New Mexico (point “B” on the map).

We’ve been to El Malpais before, so we’ll move on directly the next day to Bandelier National Monument (point “C” on the map).  I planned the trip so that our drive on day 2 will be a half day, giving us time to do a little exploring at Bandelier when we arrive. If there’s a lot to do, we can spend two nights there.

From there we have to cover another 350 miles or so to get into Denver by Friday night.  And that’s when the work begins.  Brett & Lisa will be there already and we will meet them to do some prep for Alumafandango, and check the campground to ensure everything is ready to go.

Alumafandango will keep us occupied until Sunday August 26.  Probably that night, or the next morning, we’ll hit the road again and work our way over to Utah to start checking out more national park sites.  Utah is the motherlode of great western national parks, so we’ve got a lot of choices.

Our plan at this point is somewhat open but we have a few pretty good ideas of what we would like to see and do.  I’ve got all my projects under control (they’re never really “done” but at least they are managed), and we’ve cleared our schedules so that we don’t have to get back to Tucson until September 4. So even though the early August trip didn’t work out, the late August one looks like it will.  And that’s good enough.

Our campsite in Tulsa was located right next to a highway, cramped, and featureless, yet ideal for the two nights we spent there.  There’s no question we all needed a day off from the incessant driving.  400 miles a day is nobody’s idea of fun, and the burnout factor was off the charts.

All I wanted to do was stop driving and get some work done, and for that the campground suited just fine.  The wifi was fast and  worked well (rare for a campground), the 30-amp power didn’t sag in the peak of the heat & humidity (96 degrees), and the water pressure was exemplary.  I plugged in and got busy.

Eleanor got busy too, with a chance to use her crockpot and simultaneously test a “no heat” cooking method she’s going to demonstrate at Alumafandango.  We took one break, to go grocery shopping, and otherwise were in the Airstream just doing our stuff.

The layout of the Fall magazine is about half done and progressing on schedule, we continue to forge ahead on Alumafandango, we’re nearly ready to open registration for Alumapalooza 4 (and wait till you see the cool t-shirts!), and Brett & I were able to advance another joint project that we will hopefully announce in the next couple of weeks.  It’s yet another Aluma-event, but I can’t say more than that until the contracts are signed.

A job on the “personal” list was to look ahead while we had good Internet, and decide on our reward.  See, the crazy long driving days have an upside: because we covered 2,000 miles in six days, we have a few extra days to meander around in the west before heading home.  So, how to squander our remaining time?

After considering a lot of options, we have decided to go for Guadalupe National Monument in Texas, just south of Carlsbad Caverns.  We’ve dropped in there a few times but never had the right weather to go hiking in the mountains, and that’s really what Guadalupe is all about.  The park is at about 5,000 feet, with higher mountain peaks, and summer is the time to be there so we’re going for it.

This means major sacrifices, however.  My dream of browsing the Mogollon Rim with its glorious cool forests will fall by the wayside.  We’ll have to miss Valley of Fire Recreation Area and a lot of scenic driving in northern New Mexico.  Going to Guadalupe means we will exit at El Paso on I-10 and follow a well-worn path through the lower desert across New Mexico and Arizona.  It’s not an interesting drive after the first dozen or so times, and the temperatures will be abominable.

There’s one other sacrifice as well.  We drove another 400 miles today (OK, to be accurate it was only 380) to Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Canyon TX, just south of Amarillo.  We arrived at 6 p.m., just in time to take a peek and get our campsite set up. This is a beautiful place that deserves more exploration than we’ll be able to give it, because we have to leave tomorrow morning to drive another 380 miles to Guadalupe.

I had considered spending two nights here, as we really should, but if we do that we’ll be arriving in Guadalupe on Friday night and there’s a good chance that the campground will be full.  They don’t accept reservations there, and the campground is small.  So our best strategy is to arrive on Thursday and squat on our site through the weekend.  That will give us lots of time to go hiking and decompress from the cross-country drive.  In other words, we are sacrificing Palo Duro and a few other things to get a really good visit in at Guadalupe.  I think it will be worth the tradeoff.

Blog note:  Verizon doesn’t work in this canyon so today’s blog is being posted on Thursday and backdated.  Also, prior experience has shown that our Internet connection  is extremely marginal at Guadalupe, so it’s questionable whether the blog will get updated over the weekend, but I’ll try.