Albuquerque

We left the friendly people of Texas behind and drove straight into New Mexico heading on Highway 40 to Albuquerque. We were hoping to be in Albuquerque for the famous Balloon Festival. When we had originally read about it, I was viewing the 2011 event dates. Unfortunately we were about four days too early.  We camped in a very nice campground called The American RV Park.  It is on a hill on the west side overlooking the city.

Albuquerque is the largest city in New Mexico.  It is situated pretty much in the middle of the State.  The population is over 550,000 so it is quite a large city.  The Rio Grande river runs through the city.  The river is quite low and very brown.  Makes the mighty Fraser look clean!  The Kirkland Air Force base is also in Albuquerque, but we did not see any signs of it.  The climate is dry and hot this time of year, but does cool down in the evenings.  The city has an average of 3,420 hours of sunshine a year.  Doesn't that sound wonderful!!  The city of Albuquerque has an elevation of 5000 miles and the surrounding mountains would be considerably higher. 

We visited Old Town Albuquerque.  The photo above is the entrance way into the historic Old Town.  Old town was founded in 1706 and sitting in the center of the town is the San Felipe de Neri Church which was built in 1793.  This photo does not do it justice, as it was hard to get a great shot without a bunch of vehicles parked in front of it.

 

The buildings of the old town are the beautiful if somewhat old, adobe style.  There are shops and restaurants. There was even a Rattlesnake museum which Ray said that he was going to look in.  I chose browsing through the hat shop instead.  About 3 or 4 minutes after I am minding my own business and poking through the many hats in the store, Ray comes up to me and says rather quietly "I can't go in there".  I look at him kind of funny and he says "there are live rattle snakes in there!"  I asked him what had he expected?  He thought it would not have live snakes in it.  So I walked over to the museum but could only get inside the doorway.  They had a number of large turtle there which were kind of cool and sure enough, in the back were tanks full of disgusting live rattle snakes.  I too turned around and left.  The hat shop was much more exciting!

 

 

Some of the natives had their wares set up on the side walks and were making beaded jewellery while people browsed through their crafts for sale.

 



This is one of the restaurants in the square.  I think they served quesadillas here!  It was so colorful!

When we had stopped for the night, we had planned on spending two days with the possibility of taking a balloon ride.  But unfortunately I was having some problems with my lungs and half way through our walk in Old Town, I was exhausted.  We went back to the campground and I was so tired that I had to lie down.  I could barely lift my head from the couch.  We did some investigation and finding that the altitude was possibly the cause, we decided to leave the next morning.  We did get up early in the morning and drove a ways down the road to watch some of the balloons take off.  I had wanted to get a photo of the colourful balloons, but the sun was coming up and with the glare, I was not able to get a photo worthy of posting.  There were 10 balloons going up and could only imagine what it would look like in the coming weekend.

Off we drove heading to Flagstaff.