Memories of day eight…
- Waking up in Taos, and yet more blog updates. I’m always surprised at how much time I have to put in to keep this kind of thing really going. However, I’m also pleasantly surprised at the feedback people have sent me — thank you all. It’s great to hear.
- Warning: free hotel breakfasts can be bad. Really, really bad. Also surprisingly good, but the Quality Inn in Taos most definitely was the former. (I stayed in a hotel because it was Friday night, and trying to find a campground or hotel on the weekend can be very difficult in the middle of the summer vacation season like this.)
- Wandering around town, getting breakfast, gas, and so on…I started to realize why Taos is so popular for retreats. It’s a smallish town, high up in the New Mexico mountains, with a certain kind of rustic charm to it. It’s not full of enormous posh resorts; the hotels have more of a log-cabin feel to them, and there’s a lot of local art and culture in the town. If I lived there it might feel a little much at times, but it sure is a nice place to visit.
- Taking the “high road” back to Santa Fe, as recommended by one of my guidebooks. Full of little Native American villages and tiny settlements on the verge of becoming ghost towns, but also beautiful, sweeping vistas around every curve and lots of places to stop along the way.
- There are all these little roadside memorials/graves/graveyards all over the Southwest. I’m not entirely sure if they’re primarily Native American, part of Latino culture, or both — they have more flowers, ornate monuments, and crosses on them than anything I’ve ever seen, but it’s not entirely clear if there are always people buried there or not. They do tend to have Hispanic-sounding names on them…anybody know anything about these? See the pictures above. And when I say all over, I mean all over — I’ve passed dozens in one day at times. They’re usually solitary, though occasionally I’ll go by an entire graveyard full of them, as in the pictures above.
- Believe it or not, taking the freeway up to Colorado. (I took a wrong turn out of Santa Fe and ended up going back to Taos, which, combined with spending time blogging in the morning, left me with too little time to take back roads up to CO.) This was neat for a couple of reasons: although they’re all the same, there is almost a certain kind of “freeway culture” that’s vaguely interesting to me (truckers and truck stops are so unlike most of the people I know that I find them really kind of neat). Secondly, the freeway races straight across the Great Plains, and seeing them is pretty amazing. I’ve made it all the way out from San Francisco, over the Sierras, the high desert plains, the Rockies, and onto the Great Plains.
- Finally arriving (around 11PM) at my parents’ place in Colorado (their vacation home) for a well-deserved vacation from my vacation. ;-)
- At this point, I’ve driven far enough that I could’ve reached any single point in the continental US (including Bangor, ME and Key West, FL) by now. So infinitely better to be nowhere near that far from home — because it means I’ve spent time seeing what’s out there, instead of just trying to get to one particular place.
Day 8: (Saturday, August 11, 2007) Taos, NM to Estes Park, CO.
Miles: 3073.1 + 503.3 = 3576.4 total. Current distance from home: 1,245 miles.
Photos: 1,568 (21.1 GB) + 27 (394.8 MB) = 1,595 (21.5 GB) total.
Next up: a day of rest and recuperation. Taking it easy, catching up on photos and blogging…and, most of all, sleep.
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