A bit of Albuquerque and the road home

You'll have to believe me when I say the day spent at Mesa Verde was as good as the day on Highway 12. Just very, very different. And so stunning that I just didn't take any pictures with the phone. The few I did take were with the DSLR, which have not been saved and imported over.  Ah, well...

After a full day at Mesa Verde we headed to Durango for the night. Another lovely Walmart parking lot. Don't remember exactly, but I think it was down to 17F outside that morning. It was a chilly 35F inside BoB, but that wasn't bad considering the only heat sources were two humans and a couple electric pads that were mostly off. Again, the Mr Buddy heater picked things up quick enough.

The next day was the final drive down to Albuquerque.  (geez, that's a hard word to type, gets me every time)

 Not the prettiest 'campground' around, but there's always a vacancy.

 We did stop at Aztec, NM, to check out the ruins there. If we had an extra day on the schedule we probably would have driven out to Chaco Canyon.

We got into ABQ (ah, much easier to type that instead of Albuquerque). Didn't have much planned, but I did want to ride the Sandia Peak Tramway. We stopped by one afternoon, it was closed due to high winds.  Ah well.  Went back in the morning a couple days later. It was open and running, but with a warning that it was fully clouded in at the peak. That's OK, I still wanted to go.

Didn't have much idea what we were headed into. Yeah, not much of a view from the top. In the clouds, and in the wind, as noticed by the windsock here, was probably a steady 25-30mph wind. And it was COLD.

 Look, its the view from the top!  Um...  I said... The View!   Ok, maybe not.

 No Alcohol Beyond This Point.   If you're drunk, set down the beer before you go exploring past the fenced barriers. Its 'safer' that way.

 In a way I quite enjoyed the weather at the top. Bit of a unique situation, as I'm sure not many folks bother when its like this. The fog from the clouds made for fun photos, and I was enamored by the shapes in the upper gondola tower.

The cables go to...  where, again?

 One of my favorite photos of the day.

 

 A bit of a view on the way down after dropping out of the clouds.

 Looking back up the hill from the base station.

 

Didn't really take many other pictures in ABQ, and we were only there a few days before it was time to head home. So we hit the road. We boogied the 1200 miles home in two days. Spent the night in another Walmart lot north of Ogden, UT.  It was nice when we rolled in at night, if a bit cool.  It was a bit white the next morning.

 A layer of snow does wonders for keeping things quiet.

 Fellow 'campers' behind us, getting ready to get on the road.

 The endless black stripe of road.

 It was just a little winter storm. Things were mostly clear by the time we reached western Idaho.

With that, our 12 day trip was over. It was a great break-in for the electrical components in BoB, and even though it was far from complete, it helped confirm that we liked the layout. It also made us realize that we really liked having something like BoB to do exactly this kind of thing. It would have been so much harder if we had wanted to do the trip in my Audi wagon. Possible, but not nearly as fun. And on the other side, having something no larger than BoB (who is the big boy of PMs, the long wheelbase extended) we had no problems with parking or driving any of the roads or pullouts along the way.

Now it would be winter at home, and any build progress on BoB would come to a freezing halt. Not much interest in working on the van when its barely 40F in the garage, and colder outside. But there would be new 'deadlines' to come,  eventually I would get back to it.