New Mexico day 1

August 15

We awoke in Gallup and I took advantage of the free coffee the management of the RV park offered. We drove along what had once been Route 66 through Gallup. We passed several fast food joints but it was too early in the morning for them to be open. The town of Gallup gets off to a "slow start," apparently. We continued on to Albuquerque. While we had breakfast there I checked my GPS for things to see.

The old town of Albuquerque is a few square blocks of shops that Razelle said reminded her of places she'd been in Old Mexico. These shops had items for sale that appealed to other tourists, but not us. We didn't need to alight from the van to see this. So we drove on. I wanted to see the hot-air balloon museum on the north side of town. When we got there we learned that this museum is open six days of the week; and only closed on the day we showed up. So the hot-air balloon museum was a bust and we moved on.

Rather than drive directly to Santa Fe on the Interstate we took the Turquoise Trail (NM 14) through Madrid, NM. This route was suggested to us by the manager of the Gallup RV park. When we reached Madrid we found people selling merchandise that had nostalgic meaning to us as baby boomers, rather than souvenirs of this region. The T-shirts and campaign buttons and postcards had catchy slogans that represented the opposite end of the political spectrum from what we'd been exposed to in Phoenix. We couldn't help but notice that Arizona and New Mexico were a world apart in that respect.

We drove on to Santa Fe and parked for a fee near the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. This museum had a temporary exhibit that showed paintings by Georgia O'Keefe's contemporaries, along-side photographs these artists referred to while creating their paintings. While this was truly an educational exhibit, there were only nine actual works by Georgia O'Keefe in her namesake museum. I was very disappointed about that.

Razelle was not feeling well enough today to do any walking. The old town of Santa Fe had much to offer, but Razelle wasn't up to it. We moved the van closer to the central square and found a free parking spot. The old town's central square had a stage set up and a musical group was on it playing Brazilian music. A number of aging hippy types were dancing to this music in a trance, others were just grooving to the beat and dancing samba style. We saw many pairings of couples that looked intriguing (without going into detail). Santa Fe seemed to have a laid-back live-and-let-live attitude that was obvious during our visit.

The sun was close to setting on us as we left Santa Fe. There is a KOA camper park just south of here. We called and reserved a powered site. That's where we spent the night. New Mexico is our fourth US state, and, so far, we've slept in each of the states we've visited.