Windy Windy Roads

We didn't make it to Roswell, but we found these in SonomaIt was a very windy day

It was a very windy drive

a very accurate map

petrified forest guard

is it a tree? is it a rock?

we found a car for Mara!

a bull in Madrid

On Saturday, we headed to Albuquerque. Leaving Sonoma, we drove up the same winding road we drove down the day before. We made two unscheduled detours on our way. The first was at the top of the ascent out of Sonoma. There was a scenic view and a Native American craft market. We pulled in and walked to the amazing view. We could see the winding road, but not the town below. The crafts seemed more authentic than the stuff we had seen in all the tourist gift shops we had already visited, so we picked up a few things. About two hours later, we decided that we needed to spend some time in the Petrified Forest. We drove past many interesting views and finally, we found the forest. Pretty amazing rock/trees. With all our detours, we didn't make it to Albuquerque until 8:00. We desperately needed some clean laundry, and there were some laundry room problems, so we stayed up quite late and then got up quite early to finish the drying. There was a 12:00 parade we needed to get to, about an hour away, so Albuquerque will need to be visited some other time. I'm sure it's very nice, but the little corner of it that we saw left something to be desired. We drove to Madrid, NM along the Turquoise Trail scenic route. The GPS send us on a bit of a "short cut" to the route that involved about 10 miles of unpaved rocky rutty road. We got to Madrid in time to find a good spot to park and then walked to a good viewing spot for the parade. It was a "peace parade" with many interesting animals and lots of hippies. From there, we drove on to Santa Fe and we visited the Georgia O'Keeffe museum where we saw a very nice collection of her paintings and drawings. Then we visited the New Mexico Museum of Art where they had a show of cowboy boots. Later in the evening, we drove to the High School and waited for the fire works. They were lovely and the people at our hotel had another show in the parking lot, so the 4th was complete.