Land of Enchantment and Enchanting People

It's been really nice to be back in my home state of New Mexico. We arrived last Thursday, so I've been behind in posting. As of right now, we are sitting in Midland, Texas at a Starbucks (of course). We have a short ride today to Austin. But now I'll tell you a little about our time in New Mexico.

You know you're in New Mexico when all the overpasses start looking like Aztec artwork.

We stayed in Albuquerque for two nights at my friend Steve Sullivan's house. I will refer to him as Sully to prevent confusion between the two Steve's. Sully had a Victory motorcycle and took Friday off work. We told him we wanted to have lunch in Santa Fe with Steve's aunt Elizabeth and he planned out a nice ride for us. We slept in a little ( a luxury on this trip), then headed out to Santa Fe. One of the cool things about the West is how you can see forever. Not long after we started riding, Sully pulled over and pointed to some mountains in the distance and said Santa Fe was over there. Then he pointed to some more mountains to the west and said we would come around those near Los Alamos and into Jemez Springs and then back around into Rio Rancho. He basically laid out a three-hour tour and we could see the whole thing from where we were standing.

We had a lovely lunch with Steve's aunt Elizabeth and her friend Emily at the Blue Corn restaurant. In the picture, Emily is on the left and Elizabeth is in the middle.

We continued our ride after lunch through the high desert and mountains. We stopped for a few pictures.

Steve is pointing to Sandia Peak which is the mountain Albuquerque sits at.

We also stopped at Valle Grande. It's impossible to show in a photo the magnitude of this enormous valley. Apparently, one of the largest herd of Elk frequents this valley. Unfortunately, they did not bless us with their presence this time.

As we rode into Jemez Springs, this was another beautiful mountain drive. We stopped for a drink at a place called Los Ojos with all the character of a saloon right out of a western (except maybe for the rainbow umbrella).

Steve squared.

Once back in Albuquerque, we had a BBQ at Sully's sister's house. I pretty much consider Sully's family as my family as well, so to call them friends doesn't really seem to fit. They are family.

David Sullivan and I.

Amy, Michalene and I.

 

 

On Saturday, we headed down to Alamogordo, the town I'm from. I had invited several people to Margo's for dinner at 6 p.m. so our schedule was driven by that. What we didn't count on was the high winds through the mountains.

We need to hit the road, so I'll post more later about that adventure.