Albuquerque, New Mexico

Another petroglyph.
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Nice drive yesterday. I don’t recall the Texas panhandle and eastern New Mexico being so green. I talked to one of the gentleman at the RV park and he said that they have had above-average rain this year (we wouldn’t know about that would we??). I thought that Weatherford, Oklahoma had a lot of windmills, but I think that New Mexico has it beat.  The mesas on the outskirts of Albuquerque are beautiful.

We had tire trouble about 10 miles from the RV park. We picked up a bungie cord and the hook stuck in the truck tire. The rubber part did a little cosmetic damage to the passenger side. Fortunately, Don had a tire plug and battery operated pump so he was able to get it repaired and put enough air in to get us to the gas station.

Windmills in New Mexico.
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After we unhooked at the park, we went over to the Petroglyph National Monument. We were afraid that we would not make it till this morning because they closed at 5:00. However, we found out that we could park on the outside of the gate and stay in as long as we wanted. The hillsides were covered with basaltic lava rocks from a lava flow that occurred when there was a volcanic eruption about 150,000 years ago. The ancestors of the Puebloan Indians populated this area in the 1300s. Spanish explorers and Mexican natives arrived in the 1540s and met the groups of Puebloan Indians. Their lifestyle influenced the Petroglyph drawings. You can see petroglyphs of sheep, horses, cattle, and wildlife (lizards, birds, etc.). We also saw pictures of crosses that we thought might be graffiti since we had seen other evidence of this but after reading a little more, I found that the Spanish and Mexican explorers brought the Christian influence to these people. We also saw desert millipedes EVERYWHERE, wrens, jackrabbits EVERYWHERE, lizards, and this really interesting bright red bug.

Petroglyph
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Today, we leave for Holbrook, AZ and the Petrified Forest. We will stop on the way at a place called Bandara Ice cave that I will explain later.