ljplicease | When I adventure in Albuquerque

(day one) Before Albuquerque was best known for being the place where that school teacher drug dealer dude was from^[1], it was known as that place where Bugs Bunny always made his wrong turn. For me growing up, Albuquerque was one of the only two reasonable sized cities within two hours.

We flew direct to Albuquerque. Southwest is convenient for us because they fly non-stop to just about everywhere they fly from Baltimore. We got in at about 3:30pm or so. The air was hot and dry. Totally different from the environment we had come from. Picked up the rental car and I immediately noticed two things.

I've developed this faux-OCD habit of touching the front handle before opening the back door. Because that is how you unlock my new car. I notice suddenly this is slightly odd when I have to use a car that doesn't have that feature.
People here do not drive like horrendous animals. They are terrible drivers in their own right, but it is more out of laziness and incompetence than out of malice.

Since we had a little bit of time before it got dark, we hightailed it to Sandia Peak Tramway. “Sandia” is watermelon in Spanish, apparently for the reddish color. I had always thought it was for the shape. At the top you get a great view of the valley. We walked down the path to the stone hut a ways and found a nice place for dinner. Lena had prepared a nice picnic dinner back in Maryland, so we were having ANZAC bikkies from the Australian/New Zealand couple who sell Australian meat pies at the one market, and the delicious heirloom tomatoes that we get at the other market. Also a cheese and pepperoni sandwich. No watermelon though! Only kidding. Delicious.

Actually it turns out there is a restaurant way at the top of the mountain there, which I had totally forgotten. So that would have been convenient. But it was better to have our own food and find a little place in the woods at the edge of the cliff with a wonderful view.

Also that restaurant is the top of the hill ski lodge in the winter so the food can't be that great anyway.

Oh I nearly forgot about the hotel. I had booked through one of those websites, and I asked Lena to call the hotel to let them know that we might be getting in late, only they had never heard of us! So I called up the website and I kept on being like “We made this reservation, but apparently nobody told the hotel” and they be like “So what is the problem again?” Actually that went on only a couple of times and we eventually got a new reservation and canceled the old one so as not to get double billed.

I think the most important thing is to fix things when they go wrong and that is what they did. Without pointing fingers.

Lena's picnic dinner on the mountain included delicious tomatoes from the market

Forest trail on the top of the mountain.

Breathtaking light to the west.

Lena with the valley behind her in redscale.

Another photo of Lena with nice backlighting in redscale.

Sandia peek is also the top of the ski area in ABQ.

Some pretty wild flowers

The tower that holds up the tramway. The top one was put in palce by helicopter apparently.

(day two) Thanks to Jetlag^[2], we were up early. After a nice brekky burrito^[3], we were off to Petroglyph National Monument. Thanks to the nice ranger at the visitor center, we went off to the walk with the most petroglyph instead of the walk with the most walking. And there were lots of petroglyphs. Our second stop was a set of volcanoes on the monuments western boundary. There are three extinct volcanic cones. It was about four miles to walk around all three.

It was then time for the 66 Diner. They have a ton of memorabilia, which is all the more remarkable because of the fire in which they lots a bunch of it. Route 66 doesn't exist in its contiguous form anymore, but there is a reverence for it for some reason. The 66 Diner has been a favorite of mine for many years due to the green chile cheeseburgers and the milkshake. We almost always make a stop.