Santa Rosa to Gallup,NM

 As we arose there was a soft pink color reflecting off the morning clouds.


  That color did not last anytime until the clouds completely covered the sky as we did our morning walk.  After cleaning up the clouds were beginning to drip a little.  And by the time we reached the interstate rain was the welcoming feature for the day.  It didn't take long before we were west of the rain and driving through Albuquerque.  The traffic was fairly light but rather heavy with trucks.  During our drive we climbed to over 7000' but, ended the day at about 6500'.  Since we arrived a little early we decide to do a small amount of site seeing and grocery shopping(no need to waste time).  One thing to add, Gallup had been shutdown to visitors up until the 10 of May.  We didn't learn this until after we had checked in.  Nothing was said when we made reservations back in March.  Something I haven't mentioned is that we have run parallel  with Route 66 since Oklahoma City.  And twice we have had our campground on it.

Thanks to Ken and Fran we hit the road early to go to Chaco Canyon


.  What they didn't tell us was that the final miles(18) were on dirt/rock roads.  A great deal of this section was a "washboard", making travel extremely slow.

  There was no traffic at all.  Why should there be there were no homes, just miles of nothing but dust, sage and jack rabbits.  This tends to make Jan a little nervous, "what if we have a breakdown".  Arriving at Chaco we first visited the visitors center.  Allowing us to plan our attack of the ruins.  

These ruins were amazing.  They had not been uncovered until around 1920.  At that time they had to be dug out of sand and rocks that had covered them over the last 500 years.  One of the ruins had 8900 tons of debris removed from it.  It took over 3 centuries to build these structures.  And on top of that, there were 3 different groups of indians to build these.  All of this construction was from one master plan.  I was wondering how these plans were passed from one generation to the next.

Note the thickness of the walls


and kivas, it took a long time to see any results.

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