Finishing Out the TRIP

Oh yeah! I know you have ALL been dying to hear the end of our New Mexico trip, and I've been debating about whether or not to tell you. But everybody has been really nice to us lately so..... here we go.
Now, we know that New Mexico sounds like a weird place to all of you, so as proof that there is some normalcy there Katie and the kids found a Chuckie Cheese and captured proof that a giant pizza eating mouse doesn't scare new mexican kids either.



And before, we left New Mexico, we HAD to have New Mexican food. It's not Mexican food, it's not Tex-Mex, it is the stuff that you make out of left overs in your kitchen at home that you call Mexican food except about 3,000 times hotter. Oh, yeah. In New Mexico you have to specify between green SAUCE and green CHILE. Didn't know that. Now I love hot stuff, but even I was chewing pretty slowly.... Katie couldn't even eat mine. My "burrito" consisted of a stiff flower tortilla from the supermarket wrapped around about 3 lbs. of plain ground beef with cheddar cheese on the top that looked suspiciously like it had been melted in a microwave. That was covered by about 2 cups of green CHILE.... not green SAUCE. Well now we know. We went to this place because it was "highly recommended". We found out later that you can't trust ANY restaurant recommendations in Albuquerque, because they are all based on weird family loyalties and have nothing to do with how good the actual food is. On the flip side this place did have about as much grass as you'll see anywhere down there.


Alright, we actually made it out of Albuquerque a day early! Katie had everything packed up, so when I came home from work Friday, we just took off. We decided to go north and stay the night in Montrose, CO. Sometime after midnight we hit some pretty fun mountain roads in Southern Colorado. Let's just say given the glimpses I could get from the moonlight, both Katie and I should probably have been grateful to not be able to really see what we were driving along with a uhaul behind us. We got to Montrose and pulled into a hotel whose front lobby I wish I had a picture of. Aside from the numerous and varied notices that people have been, are, and are probably right now siphoning gas from someone's car in the parking lot there were lists, and posterboards and cards notifying you of what everything in the hotel cost and no one was going to hesitate to charge you for it. The room was also plastered with both handwritten and typed notes stating the value of different things that you might find on your bill if they didn't find it in the room. On top of that, as Katie was nursing Andrew back to sleep in the middle of the night she found a hardcore porn channel streaming into our room. And we thought New Mexico was different.... Anyway, that ended up being a free stay. I mean, after all, if they're going to provide free porn, they might as well provide everything else free. So we made out with a new set of towels, robes, washcloths, bedspreads, pillows.... what? It's not like they're going to charge us...

The next day we visited Black Canyon of the Gunnsion National Park. The pictures speak for the themselves.

The river that cut the canyon has enough force during spring runoff to push boulders weighing hundreds of pounds down the canyon, effectively deepening the canyon by the thickness of a fingernail every century.

We took these next pictures at the bottom of the canyon. It is the first time I have driven a paved road that had an 18% grade. The trail to the damn up the canyon was closed because the huge boulder I'm standing next to came tumbling down the canyon and just ripped the asphalt into the river. Katie had fun forcing me into telling geology lessons. Let's just say I'm still not sure whether my kids think mica is a diamond or just shiny little flakes found in rocks. However, it's pretty clear now that pegmatyte dikes have nothing to do with homosexuality (They are giant fins that cut out from the canyon walls as they are made of harder rock than the surrounding material).

After Black Canyon of the Gunnison, we took our trial, I mean trail through Grand Junction and stopped at Fruita, CO for the night. After that it was a mad dash home in a race for our sanity after having spent so much time in the car. We're still recovering as you might can tell...