Thursday, August 23, 2018

Bandelier

(It's also known as Beans Canyon, or at least the most fascinating part of the property.)

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One of the few regrets from our visit: using the shuttle service prevented us from photographing Sherry near this entrance sign. 

On the Saturday of our four-day swing through New Mexico we visited a National Park Service site that had long been on my to-do list. Bandelier National Monument is located near Los Alamos. It features an unusual valley that had been home to Pueblo peoples four or five centuries ago.

From the cliff face at Bandelier
The cliffs loom above the settlement remains. 

I thought a dramatic picture would be one of the sky against the cliffs. 

Okay, that's a little better. 

The homes in this unusual valley were quite unusual in themselves. Cavates, or man-made caves, on the sides of the cliff served as these homes.

Caroline scales the ladder to find a cavate. 

Caroline receives instructions from Sherry about climbing down from another cavate. 

I should probably use the term man-enhanced caves because these Pueblo Indians didn't start from scratch in this valley. The cliff face's unusual properties (the rock is called tuff) created an interesting freeze-thaw phenomenon on the south-facing side in which cavities were opened in the rock. Some were small. Some were large. Many were kinda big and perfect to be enlarged into an actual dwelling space.

From a distance, the holes nature has left in the cliff faces resemble beans, hence a secondary name for the site: Frijoles Valley.

Close-up of valley settlement remains. 

Settlement remains from along the cliffside. 

Settlement remains. 

The Pueblo who lived here built residences in the side of the cliffs. But they also built a free-standing settlement on the valley floor, of which some remains remain. There was also evidence of a long house built along the foot of the cliff.

One part of the site we missed seeing was the Alcove House, which is apparently awesome, but spending only a long weekend in the area creates some limits on what one can fit in.

- - -

I told Sherry that a visit to Bandelier was a non-negotiable part of our New Mexico trip. This is a site I've obsessed over seeing since 2015. What sparked this obsession? A calendar I bought Sherry which hung in our kitchen that year. It was a calendar featuring WPA-style posters of select national parks. Each month I got to see one of these beautiful posters hanging on our wall. For some reason, Bandelier's enchanted me the most. I think it was February of that year.

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The poster.

When 2015 was over, the calendar had a second life as posters in my room. I took the calendar apart, laminated the pages, and hung them atop my front board. So 180-some days a year, I find myself enchanted by the poster again. This was simply a site I had to visit.

I even acted a bit like an idiot at the one house. 

And it didn't disappoint. The site actually made me giddy. So did Golden Gate Bridge when I saw it in 2012. So did Devil's Tower when I visited it in 2004.

In my previous post I wrote that had Sherry and I not taken the kids with us for this wedding that I would have regretted the awesome things they missed.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Four in New Mexico

The summer has been so busy, I've had a hard time chronicling our adventures. Here's an update.

Seriously, there were four of us. Someone had to take this picture atop Sandia Mountain. 

All four of us traveled to New Mexico this weekend for the wedding of a long-time friend. We received the invitation a few months ago and it took us a little while to decide that all four of us would go. But what about the expense? Will we have as much fun if the kids are with us? Will all four of us be too tired after a long trip in Hawaii? Didn't matter. We're a family. And families take advantage of opportunities like this.

The four-day weekend really was a five-day adventure. We left Lansdale at about 3:07 am on Friday. We returned at 3:30 am on Tuesday. I guess it's better to have ugly delays on the return trip than on the "to" trip.

About as far from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport as one could be. 

Let's get back, though, to the four-day weekend. Brian and Michael had some really neat festivities planned for their guests, though we had to miss the first one. We built a weekend of sight-seeing around the great party they threw for guests on Friday and a great wedding celebration on Saturday. We visited two National Park Service sites, a museum, a state capitol, and the strangest art exhibit I could have ever imagined. Oh, and we squeezed in a hike and a Minor League baseball game.

Meals, too. We had some great meals. On Day 1 it was at High Noon Cafe in Albuquerque. 

There were three sites in particular that we visited which made me realize how awful it would've been to come home and say "Hey, kids, we saw . . ." Petroglyph National Monument was a wondrous little gem, a very approachable introduction to New Mexico's history and culture. Meow Wolf would simply have not been fun without them. And Bandelier . . . there was enough there for another post entirely.

Really about the weirdest place I've ever visited. Meow Wolf. I appreciated it more near the end of our time there. In fact, I came to like it. But for 45 minutes it was disequilibrializing. 

This is all possible, of course, due to the generosity of two friends, one we've cherished for years and the other we're coming to know. Brian and Michael put together a wedding that was more thoughtful of its guests than any other I can remember. It's a shame we missed the hike Friday morning. But the venue they chose, Eldorado Hotel, was charming and they warned us well ahead of time of the need to book early (due to the Indian market in town). Their white party on Friday was a wonderful introduction for guests from around the country. Their wedding featured tables surrounding the couple marrying, and we were part of the ceremony from seats that we would keep for dinner. When we asked back in June if our kids were welcome, the answer was of course.

With Brian and Michael. 


For some reason we were able to do all of this on one tank of fuel in our rental Malibu. I'm sorry for the lame means by which I'm keeping to theme.

Santa Fe and Albuquerque are surprisingly close. 


- - -

In many ways, I feel like a circle got completed. Of all my friends, Brian feels the most like a family member. I don't say that to disparage any other friendship, simply to point out that my bond with Brian feels like it's somewhere in that land between brother and cousin. I often joke that he's my ex-relative (seriously, we were distantly related by marriage until some divorce took place somewhere around 1999). But over more than two decades of friendship I've been able to share a love of history, music, and (I know this sounds odd) heritage with him that doesn't normally exist with others. I look forward to his visits back home to his family when he and I usually find a way to make lunch or dinner work. I look at photos from my own wedding back in 1999 and realize that this might be the final wedding from my college cohort of friends that I'll get to celebrate.

Brian is behind Sherry's left shoulder in this pre-digital-age pic.


And I'm honored to have been there to witness it and share in his and Michael's hospitality.




Thursday, August 2, 2018

The Geography Teacher on Vacation

Our rental car on the Big Island. I couldn't count how many four-door hardtop Jeeps I saw there. Oh, and they were usually white. 

I've logged a lot of miles on three rental cars on three of the Hawaiian Islands this vacation. It's given me a lot of time to make some observations. 

Oahu is the island I saw the smallest amount of, so I'm not going to comment much on that here. My driving there was really confined to Honolulu and its immediate surroundings. 

The Big Island and Maui boast similar populations: 187,000 and 144,000, respectively. The sheer volume of tourists on the latter, though, probably boosts the number of people here up and above the Hawaii figure. Let's just say they're relatively equal. However, the land masses are quite different in size. One is 4,000 square miles. The other just over 700. (I'll let you figure out which is which.)

Driving from place to place on the big island took some time because the distances were fairly significant. And one goes a long ways between towns. Usually, one is able to drive at near highway speeds there. 

On Maui, however, any drive measured in miles is pretty short by East Coast standards. However the sheer density of people here, and the geographic limitations on what roads can do, make travel times rather long. In this regard the two islands seem like inside-out versions of one another. 

One commonality, though, is that highways usually don't go through neighborhoods. Usually residential areas are set just down- or uphill from the highway. Since the vegetation is pretty thick and the construction style low, I've often realized after the fact that I just passed by a significant town. 

Another commonality: there's not much habitable (for humans at least) in the middle of these islands, so any trek has one traveling around a mountain. 

It's a really unique experience, at least for the driver.