Southwest Roadtrip - Day 4

On Day 4, we got a relatively early start as we planned to do many things for the day. We started by visiting the Petroglyph National Monument and went on 3 short trails where you can look at Petroglyphs created by ancient pueblo people many many years ago. It was amazing, walking through those trails and imagining how those people used to carve these images using stone tools. One of the trails involved going up a small mountain, the views from top were pretty cool.


Our next stop was at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center & Museum. We decided to have lunch there before going to the exhibits, the museum had a pretty good cafe where we got to try the famous New Mexico style green and red chili sauce. If you go to any restaurant in New Mexico, you will always get this question - Red or Green Chili? I opted the easy way and went for the X-mas chili that lets you sample both.


The museum was not too huge but had some nice exhibits showing the life and traditions of the Native Americans and their communities. There was a lot to learn about the history and culture, but since we had limited time we tried best to cover as much as we could. In weekends, they also have Native American dances which would have been cool to see.

After the museum, we decided to take the Turquoise Trail from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The trail is called so because it passes through the prominent mining towns where Turquoise was and is still mined. Most of the towns are deserted now and have little going on, but the route was scenic and gives you lots of opportunities to stop and take pictures or explore these towns. We stopped at a small town called Madrid, there was one main street with few shops and a couple of cafes. I went to few shops and bought a handmade wooden toy and a Turquoise earring.


There is an interesting story behind these earrings. I wore these earrings as soon as I bought them, but because of the design I felt they could fall and get lost easily. And it did happen, when we reached the hotel room I realized I lost one of them. I went and looked everywhere including the parking lot, car, hotel lobby but couldn't find it. Later that night, we were walking back after dinner and for some reason I decided to go look on the street outside the hotel and there was my lost earring.. go figure.


We reached our hotel in Santa Fe around 6.30PM and freshened up and went to the downtown/Plaza area which was a 10 min walk. The Plaza area has a park and shops, art galleries and restaurants surrounding the park. The whole area was decorated for the holidays and looked very festive. There was a beautiful church close by. Things close pretty early (7 - 8PM) in Santa Fe, so we walked around just window shopping and had dinner at a Pizzeria. By the time we finished dinner and got out, the temperature had dropped and it was very cold. But since we were staying pretty close by, we got back to the hotel in 10 minutes and decided to call it a day.