I'm writing this post from a Starbucks south of Toronto, Canada. When I started writing this blog I just assumed that there would always be downtime to write posts and updates but that hasn't really been the case. The delay between where I have written about and where I am is now almost up to a month so things might be a bit more brief than usual until I catch up (I'll do it I swear!).
We left our cute campsite early in the morning and picked up the rest of the route through Monument Valley. Even though it looked nothing like it normally would it was still really impressive. All of the rock features have names (which I have forgotten...) and back stories. The valley crosses from Arizona into Utah and soon after we crossed in to Colorado. We saw a lot of evidence of the previous day's rain with swollen rivers and flooded fields.
This is called Mexican Hat!
Our destination for the night was Santa Fe New Mexico but we decided to make a detour to Four Corners as it was nearby. Four Corners is a monument built at the spot where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. It was less tacky than I had expected with a little plaza built on top of the meeting place. We took the usual photos standing in all four states and looked at all of the Native American trinkets for sale.
We had a long way to go to get to Santa Fe however so we didn't hang around for too long. The drive took us through the north western section of New Mexico and I have to say that for me this was by far the most boring drive of the trip. The landscape was bleak and uninteresting and the roads were bad. At one point there was a bridge where the road surface rose was about 5 cm higher than that of the road leading up to it. Apparently having signs saying Bump just beforehand makes this acceptable. Luckily I saw it from far away otherwise it would have done some serious damage at high speed.
The rain soon returned and we drove in drizzle through the boring landscape for a couple of hours. Stopping for gas in the middle of nowhere proved to be interesting with really old fashioned gas pumps. It took us about five minutes to figure out how to get the gas to actually start pumping.
We stopped in at a small town just north of Santa Fe called Chimayo to visit a chapel that was significant for Peggy and Todd. It turned out to be an amazing historic building called El Santuario de Chimayo and is supposedly the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the USA. The chapel was just one of a number of buildings and sculptures on the site.
Santa Fe is a really cool city. The downtown all shares a distinctive Adobe architecture and is lush and green with trees, not what I was expecting at all. It was also the coldest place we had visited so far on the trip. We went out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant called Tomasitas which was awesome.
We spent the night at a cool campsite just south of the town. We had to do our first lot of laundry here which ended up taking forever and kept us up until after midnight. It felt strangely cold among the flowering cacti behind our site.
We woke early the next day to go back into Santa Fe for the morning. Canyon Street is famous for art galleries and it was cool to look at all of the sculptures and metal work. The historic centre of the town featured a large shaded square and more impressive old churches. It almost felt European with it's consistent architecture and old buildings. We couldn't stay too long to appreciate it however as we had a long drive planned for the afternoon south to Carlsbad Caverns which I'll cover next time.
