The Severed Cortex

Breakfast at the Casa Blanca Inn is a continental affair and it starts at 7:30. That's fine with us because we have a long day of driving ahead of us. We load up on power carbs, gas up the car, and by 8:30 we're on our way to Four Corners monument.
We travel through the lovely towns of Shiprock and Waterflow. Ok, they're not really lovely. In fact, they're real shitholes. Other than the cool looking rock called Shiprock, the scenery is atrocious. I can see why the government made it an Indian reservation and the poverty stricken Indians who liver there aren't improving the landscape any with their ramshackle houses and the obligatory mess of junk cars that seems to be endemic to New Mexico.
We duck into Arizona, (who knew I'd be in Phoenix a week ago and up here a week later), then head up US 160 to Four Corners. The guide book said the scenery was not very good here, but I guess that's arguable. I liked it a lot, but it definitely isn't as nice as the Santa Fe or San Juan mountains. It's certainly a geologists wet dream though.
We take the obligatory pic standing in all four states, then walk around in all four of them. While taking the picture, there is another couple doing the exact same thing we were. The man was wearing a Rams jacket. I comment that it's awfully bold to be wearing the jacket a day after the Cowboys pummeled the Rams, and he tells me they're from Shrewsbury. Small world. The porta potties were set up in Utah and if I were given the choice, I'd have set them up there too. Twenty minutes later we're on our way to Mesa Verde, the sole purpose of our trip. The scenery gets better the closer we get to Cortez.

We arrive at Mesa Verde around 11:00, not realizing it's a twenty five mile ride from the park entrance back to the cliff dwellings. The ride back into the park is spectacular. At one point, a coyote ran alongside the car. There are a couple of different options for you in the park. One is to take a ranger guided tour of either Cliff Palace or Balcony House or both ... for a meager $3.00/person. The other is to do a self tour, but with the self tour all you really get to see are the larger dwellings from a view across the canyon. The exception is The Spruce Tree House which you are allowed to hike down to and explore from an arms length. We decided on the best of both worlds. We paid to have the ranger led tour of Cliff Palace. The rest of the places we hiked to on our own although most of them you can drive your car right up to and walk a very short distance. We saw some adobe pit houses and a few other cliff dwellings like Square Tower this way. We also hiked down to Spruce Tree House, and of course I couldn't pass up the opportunity to show that I discovered this in the parking lot there. It warmed my heart. It would be impossible for me to accurately describe how beautiful Mesa Verde is, so hopefully the few pictures I posted here will give you an indication. You really just have to see it for yourself. There are over 600 cliff dwellings scattered throughout the park and we saw maybe fifteen of them. Most of those were viewable only from a very long distance away. The structures are just amazing and to think that people actually lived and had a whole civilization there 1000 years ago is just mind boggling to me.

We left the park around 5:30 and headed back to Farmington. Before cashing it in back at the B & B, we stop at Three Rivers Brewery on Main Stret for some well needed comfort food. I have tortilla soup and a burger and wash it down with their heavy red called Giant Red. Nancy has green chile chicken soup and a chicken sandwich with guacamole. She drowns that in their Golden Honey beer. Good stuff.

The fixed the heater in the room and now it's too freakin' hot in there. I bet if we were staying another night it would be just right.