5515 miles and Counting...

It took 5515 miles to get from Silver Spring MD to Hermosa beach. Here is the route we took so you can understand how we added 2500 miles to the 3000 Mile trip across country.



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Happy Cinco de mayo

Yes, we made it to Cali and are a few entries behind in the blog but it is tough to blog and camp at the same time. I will catch up on siaz de mayo.

Ghost Town's

After our outdoor experience with Pepe we headed north to check out Colorado and the rocky mountains. Our destination was Aspen but we ended spending the night in Vail after we found out that Independence pass was closed. When we arrived at Vail it became clear that it was a ghost town, the resort had closed a few weeks before and now all the hotels, restaurants, ski slopes and shops were closed and under repair. The frustrating part to the few souls that were still around Vail was the slopes were still in great condition after one of the greatest ski season's in Colorado's history.
The next day we visited another ghost town called Aspen before we stopped over in Montrose. It was a bittersweet couple of days because the slopes were calling our name but none of the lifts were running. :(

Taos and the Great Outdoors - John Candy Style

The Rio Grande Gorge Near Taos New Mexico
Kiwi Chilling at our Camp Site
A view of Eagle's Nest lake

After Santa Fe we headed north to Taos so we could do some camping and fishing and to realize why all that camping gear we lugged 4000 miles ( Yes 4000 miles and counting) might just be taking up space. We camped two nights on the Cimmiron river in North Eastern New Mexico and were having a great time until we met Pepe Le Peu.

Skunks are a confident bunch, I guess because nothing thinks messing with them is worth the trouble because Pepe confidently moseyed into camp and started chowing down on Kiwi's dog food which was two feet away from us around 9 p.m. Now trying to scare a skunk away is delicate business because the last thing I wanted to do was to take a bath in the 50 degree river so we found that an effective method is to say "shoosh" in a quiet relaxing manor and whimper a little bit. Unfortunately this skunk knew it was king so it cased the joint for 30 minutes until we jumped into our tent and prayed it didn't want to sleep with us.

4 years and counting.

We celebrated our 4 year anniversary in Santa Fe by having a great time and doing a lot of window shopping. Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico and has a thriving arts scene, well lets make that a thriving gallery scene. Santa Fe is an incredible city withs its great weather, blue skies, and southwestern architecture which seemed to inspire countless artist like Georgia O'Keeffe. The only part that was disappointing was it seemed that the groovy hippies and artist that made the art scenes so unique got rich doing it because everything was ridiculously priced. I could have opened a tye die T-Shirt shop and charged $150 a shirt and no one in the town would have blinked.

We also managed to visit St. Francis, which houses the oldest hand-carved Madonna statue in the US (http://www.visitsantafe.com/businesspage.cfm?who=SaintFrancis) as well as the Loretto Chapel that houses the miracle staircase (http://www.lorettochapel.com/history.html).

White Sands National Monument

We spent the afternoon and evening in White Sands National Monument trying to find our inner Ansel Adams and doing some sandboggining

Mulder and Scully investigate Roswell

Roswell's biggest claim to fame is when some unidentified wreckage turned up on a remote farm in July 1947 and the government quickly released a statement saying the wreckage was from an unidentified disk and then quickly pulled the statement from all news organizations. The other weird fact was the local mortician was called by someone representing the government asking if he had any child hermetically sealed caskets for some tissue samples that had been exposed to the elements for a couple of days. Great stuff right!

Well we started the investigation at the UFO Museum in Roswell. We were hoping to see some cold hard facts, but the museum turned out to be a high school science fair project and unless you counted the recreation of the crash site out of toothpicks evidence we came away feeling that the story might have been generated just to con me to coming to Roswell.