Albuquerque

Travel Day - Grants, NM

On Tuesday I got up and headed to Grants, New Mexico, with a stop at the Petrified Forest National Park along the way. It was a total of about 337 miles and about 6.5 hours of driving, not including the time I spent walking around in the park. It was the first time that I had the trailer with me while sight-seeing, and I am really glad I didn’t do that much before. There were a few lookouts I had to skip altogether because there wasn’t enough room to turn around, and some others that I had to skip because there wasn’t any available RV parking. It didn’t even seem particularly busy either, just bad timing on my part apparently. The trail around the Petrified Forest Visitor Center was nice though, some of the logs were absolutely beautiful: At the other end of the park is the Painted Desert, it was beautiful too:

I ended the day at a Harvest Host called Junkyard on 66 Brewery. This was the first time I arrived after dark, and it didn’t go well. It had apparently rained there all day, so when they told me where to park it was through a very muddy area and I ended up getting stuck and had to get pulled out. I ended up getting to a spot that was more gravel than mud, but I still had a small pond that prevented me from getting to one of my doors:

Fortunately they had some of the best beers that I have tried on this trip, plus the whole interior was full of old car parts, including the pickup truck tailgate tables, which look really cool but weren’t very practical:

Travel Day - Albuquerque, NM

When I left Wednesday morning I had mud tracks on either side of my trailer once I got back out to a normal road: I guess I was lucky that it rained the whole day, as an hour or so at highway speeds and it was cleaned up. Because the options were somewhat limited, I had ended up staying just outside Albuquerque the night before, so I only had to drive about 70 miles. The bad news about it raining all day is that setting up in the rain is not pleasant, and the red mud at this campground made things even worse:

Petroglyph National Monument

Early Thursday morning it was still raining, so the main reason I was in Albuquerque at this time, for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, had the morning events cancelled. From what I understand, it isn’t that the balloons can’t get wet, but that the rain brings some undesirable wind conditions for flying balloons. By late morning things had improved a bit, so I went to the Petroglyph National Monument. I went to the Boca Negra canyon, which has some of the shorter trails, but it was still drizzling so I wasn’t interested in getting too far away from my truck. There were still some interesting petroglyphs to see though:

Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta

Finally Friday morning didn’t have any rain in the forecast, so I got up early (4 AM!) and went to a mall that was doing a park and ride shuttle to the field the fiesta is held on. Not really knowing what to expect, I was still shocked at how many people were there. I walked past approximately a half mile line of school buses lined up ready to shuttle people to the field! Getting up early was worth it though, I made it in time to see the Dawn Patrol launch, which is an initial small group of balloons that go up to check on conditions (don’t come at me for the vertical videos):

There was a short delay because of a rain cloud that popped up near the field, but eventually approval was given to start blowing up and launching balloons. Friday was special shapes day, so in addition to the typical hot air balloon shape, there were over 100 special shapes of cartoon characters, movie characters, and animals. I took way too many pictures to post them all, but here are a few of my favorites:

I had pretty high expectations for this going in, and it absolutely exceeded them. Seeing all these balloons go up within 90 minutes was awesome: