10-10-07 Wednesday

Up early for breakfast at the lodge, again not a wonderful experience as many items on the continental breakfast menu were not available. After breakfast we headed to the Visitor Center to get our tickets for the tour to Cliff Palace. Annie and Carol both made the trip...we were all huffing and puffing at the end, but we climbed all 5 wooden ladders and went down all those steps. Jo Schrock was our ranger for the tour and she was EXTREMELY knowledgable and told us many stories of Indian culture. She was really awesome and we loved her tour. We were the first tour in and we were a pretty small group as well so it was really great. Got some really good pix of the ladders and narrow steps we had to traverse to get to the cliff dwelling.....it was a great morning. Annie kept saying, "My family is not going to believe this...Michael was here this summer and he told me - Mom, you will never be able to do this!" Guess she proved him wrong. Thanks to inhalers and plenty of rest stops we made it!!!! Around every turn, especially where there was a VERY narrow staircase or one of the 5 log ladders we had to climb we could hear either Annie or Carol saying, "Oh my God!! Look at this!" It was truly an awesome trip!!!

From Cliff Palace we went to the museum to stock up on videos or books. We left there and began our journey to Bandelier National Monument. It took us far longer than we anticipated and we also took a shortcut. There were thunderstorms in the area and the road we needed to take that was the most direct route was impassable after a rain. You never know which way mountain roads will take you...so after some hesitation we decided to go for it and if it got muddy or started raining we would just turn around and head back. It was another beautiful drive and we dodged the rain. The aspen were glorious in places and in others had already lost their leaves.

We finally arrived at Bandelier about 5:15 and it closed at 6:30 so we had to hurry. The Visitor Center was closed so we did not get our stamp but we did walk back to some of the ruins and were able to get up to them. It was awesome. Annie and Carol opted to wait at the car for us, but when they found out it was a level walk they decided to walk down to where we had gone up to the cliff face. These were much different cliff dwellers than the Pueblo Indians of Mesa Verde...they seemed to use the cliff faces as they found them or they carved the rooms out of the stone walls of the canyons. Of course these cliffs are honeycombed with caves and hollows, etc. that kind of make it a natural for dwellings. There were ruins in the valley that had been constructed of adobe bricks and some of these were quite large. We kind of rushed through this as we still had to make Albuequerque tonite.

We had to go to Santa Fe and then on to Albuequerque from there. Took us about an hour once we got to Santa Fe. Finally arrived at the hotel about 8:30 or 8:45 and walked to Applebee's for a light dinner. Turns out that this is the same hotel we stayed at when we were here in 02 with Jean and Richard. Got to bed rather late, and had to be up early for the sunrise special shapes mass ascension.

p.s. Sorry the pictures for this day seem to be a bit out of order, but I think I am no longer in the state of New Mexico, but in the state of confusion!