Thanksgiving at Grandma's

Thanksgiving started off with and uneventful road trip to my Mums house in Los Alamos, New Mexico. As seen it the photo, Los Alamos is perched in top of a series of mesas in a high desert environment. Known mainly as the birth place of the atomic bomb, it is also extremely scenic and full of ancient Hispanic and Indian culture. Mom runs a quaint little bed & breakfast known as Casa del Rey in the suburb of White Rock. When a food based holiday is rolls around there is no better place to be cause Mom also happened to be an excellent baker, and cook. Dinner was excellent and with bellies stuffed I managed to nap away most of the afternoon.

No visit to this area is complete without a trip to the Plaza in Santa Fe for some jewelry shopping. Therefore, the day after Thanksgiving we headed down to make sure Bec had a chance to check out the wares. The town had a lot of their Christmas decorations out including the Spanish luminarios (a sand filled bag with a candle in it) that are placed on the walls and roofs, and lighted at night for an old fashion version of Christmas lights.

Saturday we took a short hike into the Tsankawi Indian ruins which is part of the Bandelier National Monument just outside White Rock. The whole area if full of old Indian cliff dwelling, and artifacts, but Tsankawi has been preserved due to it's high concentration. Ancient broken pottery is everywhere and everyone is on the honor system not to haul it away. The pictographs are one of the most fascinating things to me. We spent a couple of hours climbing ladders and exploring the caves before heading out.

I can't say that the ride back to Denver was uneventful. Quite the contrary. We went from dry roads and clear skies to blowing snow and ground blizzards. With multiple road closures around Denver we eventually got shunted onto one of the mostly highly congested mountain freeways in the state which turned a normal 6 hour drive into a 12 hour epic. During the trip Bec asked me if the weather ever got any worse than this. "Yes," I said "only then the road gets closed and we wouldn't be driving on it". Surprisingly we heard on the news that night that indeed they had closed the road behind us about an hour after we got on.