The short story is, my girlfriend Adriana is visiting me from Monterrey, Mexico for the summer and I decided to take a big road trip with her through some states I have never been in. We left the Houston area on June 20th and headed for the border so she could renew her permit. After we got all that straightened out we headed to camp for the night in one of my favorite places; Bandera.
We stayed a night in Bandera then another night with a good friend from Mexico who has a 120yr old ranch house around Medina Lakes!!!! Then we hit the road again for west texas and New Mexico and it was quite a drive through some very beautiful ranch lands. I took her to see the famous Luchenbach, Texas (of the song "lets goto luchenbach") and some other cool things. We made it to Hobbs, NM around 12am where we crashed out in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
We headed out to Cloudcroft, NM the next day but most of the national/state parks are closed right now due to serious fire hazards and currently burning wildfires. We found a small RV park on the Apache Reservation that let us camp for $15 so we decided to stay the night there. We parked high up on a hill with a good view of 3 mountain peaks and warmed up some chili with red wine, romantic I know! We left again in the afternoon after a run through the mountains with Adriana that almost killed me.
After Cloudcroft we headed out through some beautiful areas of new mex and visited some ancient ruins of the Anasazi Indians. Then we headed north to Moriarty, NM and jumped on old Route 66 into Albuquerque,NM. We had dinner that night at a fantastic "New Mexican" restaraunt that just blew our minds, especially with the chili sauce. We listened to a really cool musician play who gave me a cd for giving him a $3 tip! The owner of the restaraunt came and personally talked to us about the food and to Adriana because she is from/lives in Mexico. We camped that night again in a damn Wal-Mart.
We arrived in Taos sometime the following day and promptly checked out the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge which definently made both of us nervous walking on. Around 680ft above the river and some 1200ft across, its a doozy of a drop!!! We camped again in a Wal-Mart (Im not advertising for them I swear! Cheap camping sites are a little hard to come by around here) and in the morning we headed out to check out the Taos Pueblo, the oldest continually inhabited place in the USA. Some of the adobe buildings are over 1000yrs old! The Tewa indians are great people if not a little secretive and guarded over their history and lore but who can blame them after the suffering the Spanish and later White settlers inflicted upon them. They claim to have started the revolution against the Spanish with freed all of the Pueblos in NM until the spanish later re-conquered them. Then when the US Govt had control, they assasinated the then Govenor of the territories.
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