Get together at Mom's

Guillermo and I decided to run to HEB in the late morning, thinking we'd get there and back before Sarah and her kids showed up.  Well, we had JUST gotten to HEB when we get a call from Sarah, saying she was at our house!  So, we got right back in our car and drove back home.

After getting them settled inside, we all went back to HEB to pick up something for lunch and a few more items. Then we came back home, had lunch and it was time for the kids to take their nap!

Later that day, we all went to Mom's house for a little get-together.  It was nice getting together with everyone.

Jacob was so happy to be able to share some of his toys with Adelae and Kyrielle.

Sarah and Linda in conversation.

A nice surprise was having my friend from high school show up.  We hadn't talked to each other in years!

Guillermo's back home

Picked up Guillermo and Alfred on Thursday.
We had Chela's tacos for lunch
Family came over on Friday evening.
Took Alfred to airport on Saturday morning.

Yesterday I had lunch downtown at Casa Rio with my friend Melanie.  She is a friend from high school.

Today I mowed the front yard in anticipation of Guillermo and Alfred coming home tomorrow morning!  :-)

Fun afternoon

Today I had lunch with former co-workers from Elrod - we all met at Sea Island Shrimp House and we had a great time.  We were there for almost 3 hours!!!

That's Lorraine, me, Angie, Ann, Kathy, Sylvia and Betty.

Back home - July 24th

So, today ended our trip totally.  Mom and I got up early (Chris, too - he was also staying at Mom's house) and went to church.  After church, I packed up my stuff and drove back home.

Not much new at home - plants looked fine although the garden looked a little rough.  So rough that I braved the heat to give it a  little bit of water.  Texas is still in a terrible drought and everyday the high gets to 100 or higher.

Guillermo and Alfred are visiting Iguazu Falls today, so I hope they are enjoying themselves.

Our last day in Albuquerque - July 23rd

Last morning with our rental car, so we decided to make the best of it.
After having one more breakfast in our hotel (the usual - waffles, sausage, yogurt, juice, etc.) we rushed around to get ready to go to the Botanical Garden, which we THOUGHT opened at 8.  When we got to the center, we should have known when we saw hardly any cars in the parking lot.  Sure enough, when we walked in (the gate was open so it looked promising), they notified that the gardens don't open until 9 and the train doesn't start running until 10.  So, since it was only 8:30, we decided to leave and instead drove around Tingley Beach again. This time we were able to get out and walk around one of the ponds, watching all the ducks and geese doing their thing.

From there, we drove back towards our hotel so that we could go to the nearby Starbucks.  Once we were done with Starbucks, we made the decision to go ahead and go BACK to the Botanical Garden and try to ride that train.  Lots more cars in the parking lot this time.  We go in, pay our entrance fee and then head for the train station and wait in line.  We thought the train would leave at 10, the people there told us it comes at 10:15.  At around 10:20 or so, a train came but passed right on by us, saying they had to turn around.  Crazy.  So, now it's getting later and later and we are running out of time to return to the hotel to pack up and get the rental car back to Enterprise by 1pm.   After figuring out how long this train thing would take, we decided to get out of line, ask for our money back and leave the gardens.  Well, there were people in line to buy tickets so there was no one we could ask if we could get a refund without wasting MORE time waiting in line.  So, we did the next best thing, and that was we decided to at least visit the aquarium.  Which turned out to be a good thing, because at least it was air conditioned in there.  We enjoyed the aquarium very much, and of course, at the exit of the aquarium is a gift shop.  Mom wanted to look around in there, and I wanted to go out and see a LITTLE bit of the gardens, so we agreed to meet in the courtyard at 11.  What I saw of the gardens was very pretty and I enjoyed the model railroad garden too (which when Mom was done, we rushed over to look at).

We got back to the hotel in good time to pack up and drive to the rental car place.  We got the car there with 5 minutes to spare.  After being shocked that they would NOT be able to take us to the airport, we had no choice but to have them take us back to our hotel, from where we called a taxi to take us to the airport.  We were hoping to avoid one more taxi fare, but oh well.

We had about a 3 hour wait in the airport, but we read the paper, enjoyed an ice cream and just took it easy.
Our flight to Denver was good.  We had about an hour and a half wait in Denver for our next flight.

Whoa, the turbulence on the flight to San Antonio!!!!  And as luck would have it, I was not in my seat.  The beverage cart had passed, so I asked the two people sitting next to me to let me out so that I could go to the bathroom.  Our seats were two rows away from the back, close to the bathroom so when I got out of the bathroom, I hadn't been out more than 15 seconds and was just about to get to my row (the people had noticed I came out and had already gotten up to let me in) when the most incredible turbulence hit.  I have never experienced turbulence while standing and it was unreal.  It felt like my knees were buckling under me and at the same time, I could not lift my legs at all to continue walking.  It was the weirdest and scariest feeling.  The plane was shaking so bad and I knew I just needed to get into my seat and get buckled!  Twice the sensation was there of my knees almost being brought to the ground and feeling like I was paralyzed and couldn't lift my legs.  Finally, I stumbled to my seat, and looked outside and saw incredible lightning going on. We were going RIGHT THROUGH a thunderstorm.  The other two people got back in their seats, too, and pretty much right after we got seated, the turbulence lessened and then we were out of the storm.  The guy who was sitting next to me was kind of in awe also about what had just happened.  We were the only 3 people up at that time (besides the stewardesses) and the guy kept talking about how awesome that was to feel like your knees were giving out and of being stuck to the floor.  Of course, we agreed that it was awesome NOW, knowing that we came out of it ok.  But while it was happening, it was quite scary.

We got into San Antonio at 11:30pm, Kathy and Chris were there to pick us up and she dropped us off at Mom's house, where I spent the night.  Mom and I had a very nice trip.

Another busy and fun day

Sure is nice having a car.....

After breakfast this morning (waffles again!), we got ready to drive to the tramway for Sandia Peak.  We got to the lift station around 10:30 and by 11:00 we were on our way up the mountain.  My goodness that is an incredible ride.  Such beautiful scenery!  Here is Mom as the tram was just starting out.

And some of the scenery as we got higher up. As taken from inside the tram.

Sure was beautiful up at the top, and so much cooler!

We had lunch at the "High Finance" Restaurant up on top.  We had soup, salad, fish and chips, and a delicious chocolate cake.

A few pictures of another tram arriving, to give a perspective of from where we came.  The tram ride is over 2 miles long!

As you can see from that last picture, there were rain storms in the area, but they never got to where we were so we had a wonderful visit to Sandia Peak.  We looked around in the visitor center, talking with the volunteer worker there and some other visitors.  We would have liked to walk around more in the area, but all visitors were confined to the boardwalk, due to the extreme fire danger.  But Mom enjoyed looking at all the plants that she could from the boardwalk!

After we came back down with the tram, we spent a fun time in the gift shop looking for some neat things to take home.  Driving back down off of the mountain, we decided to drive up Hwy. 25 to see if we could find the Sandia Pueblo.  We drove until we came to a place we could turn around (which was quite a distance!) but we never found the pueblo.  On the way back, Mom mentioned that she has never seen a casino inside and since we had passed one on our way down from Sandia Peak, we decided that we should just go to that casino!  We did the valet parking (free!), then walked around inside among the slot machines and tables, just observing everything that was going on.  We DID put one dollar in one machine and got nothing.  We were amazed at the people who seemed to just keep pushing buttons and pulling handles without ever putting any money in, until we saw somebody just stick their credit card in.  So, we guessed that's how some people do it.  Anyway, it got old after a while, walking around in there, so we slipped into the gift shop, then went back out and they got our car for us and we left.  Mom thought the whole experience was very interesting.

In the gift shop, I had asked one of the employees if she knew where the Sandia Pueblo, and she gave us directions, but the place was closed.  So, we figured it was time to head back to our hotel.  As we neared the hotel, we decided to try one more time to find the road that takes you to the back of the little volcanoes and this time we found it!  We were so excited to finally be on the road to those volcanoes!  We had tried 2 times already to get close to those volcanoes.  So, here are some pictures of the little volcanoes that are in the Petroglyph National Monument.
                                             One of the volcanoes with interesting clouds behind it.

In the very center of this picture there is a little black dot - that is a person walking towards the parking lot where we were.  He had walked to the top of one volcano, across to this one pictured here and then gave up on taking the trail back and was cutting across this field.  Believe me, it was HOT out here, and he had no hat or water on him.

The third volcano with a nice rain shower going on behind it.

Even though it was hot, we were so happy to have found a place to see the volcanoes closer up.  We always looked for the three volcanoes as we were driving around town.

Later that evening, we drove out to a place called Dion's, because we had seen them around Albuquerque and wanted to try a place that was only in Albuquerque.  It turned out to be a pizza place and we had a delicious artichoke pizza with salad for dinner.

Then we drove back to our hotel, but the sunset looked so pretty again where the volcanoes were that we decided to go back out and see the volcanoes against the sunset.  By the time we got to within a good viewing distance, the light had faded pretty much so we were too late.  BUT, driving back towards Albuquerque we were able to see the sprawling city all lit up and that in itself was really beautiful.  So, we ended our last night in Albuquerque late, but happy that we had seen most of the things we wanted to see.

Freedom to roam

Because we got a rental car yesterday!!!!!

Guess we really have been doing a lot of things here in Albuquerque, because this is a very long post.

Thursday, July 21, 2011
It seemed a miracle when finally on Wednesday I was able to reserve a rental car.  So, today, after breakfast we excitedly waited until 9:30am when Enterprise was going to pick us up from our hotel.  After doing all the paper work, finally finally finally I was in the driver's seat.  Yes!!!!

From the rental car place, we drove straight to the Petroglyph National Monument.  When we parked at the visitor center and got out of the car, one of the first things we saw was a quail!!

Mom looks cool, but it was quite hot!

More quail!  There are four of them in this picture.

It turns out that to see any petroglyphs, we had to drive to another area, park and do some short trails.  The next few pictures are taken on those trails.  In the first picture, there's a petroglyph to my right.

We were lucky while we were here, MOST of the time, the sun was behind a cloud.  It was still hot, though.

We thought the Petroglyph Monument was very interesting!  When we were done there, and since it was close to lunch time, we decided to look for a place to eat.  We drove down one of the  main streets by our hotel, and saw a few interesting things but didn't stop anywhere.  We kept on going until we thought we may as well turn around and pick one of the places we had seen.  But the street we decided to turn around on was Central Avenue and as soon as we made the left turn, we saw the sign across the highway for Route 66!

Since I had read in one of the Albuquerque magazines that there was a mile stretch of this highway that was special I decided to drive down it for at least a mile and get to the other sign.  Well, the highway was interesting, it was straight out of the 50's.  Lots of 50's looking motels, some still in business but many not.  And all sorts of buildings and businesses that had a very dated look.  We thought we had gone a mile, but still hadn't passed the other Route 66 sign.  We decided to keep on going anyway.  We crossed the Rio Grande and right after that we decided to turn around and go back.  But it turned out the first street after the Rio Grande led us right to a special area called Tingley Beach.  We decided to check it out.  It had several nice sized ponds with lots of ducks and Canada Geese around them.  We drove slowly around them and wanted to get out, but it was way too hot.  This interesting sculpture was at the end of one of the lakes.

After driving around the lakes, we went back out to Central Avenue and found a little Mexican restaurant that we had seen earlier.  It was a decent restaurant, EL Charritos, but their dishes were way too big.  After having lunch we went back to Jackie's apartment and waited close to 45 minutes to talk to the lady in the leasing office.  We left a package for Jackie and then went back to our hotel and rested a little bit.

We went back out in the early evening, even though it looked like storms were firing up all around Albuquerque.  We drove to the University of New Mexico's campus to see the Duck Pond.  When we finally found the place, and found a parking lot, it had already started to rain a little bit.  But it wasn't that hard, so we decided to try to walk to the Duck Pond anyway.  The wind was blowing, it was quite cool, it was raining lightly and we wondered if we were going to be caught out at the Duck Pond in a real downpour.  The first picture shows the Duck Pond with lots of blooms that had fallen in the water.

It never did rain very heavy and we were able to enjoy this area as long as we wanted to.

From the university, we decided to catch Central Avenue from close by and drive it all the way across town, THROUGH downtown!  We were glad we decided to do that since the downtown area was so interesting.  Then we passed by Old Town, and I couldn't resist stopping there.  We spent some time in the tourist shops, picking up a few items, which is always fun.

From there, we continued on up Central Avenue and decided to stop at one of the old diners to have dinner.  After eating, we thought we'd go to another mall on the northwest side of Albuquerque even though we both weren't that excited about going there.  But we wanted to at least see where it was so we ended up driving out there anyway.  Things work out because after getting to the mall and seeing where it was, as I was driving back to our hotel, I happened to glance toward the mountains and down a street I could see what looked like a goldish-pinkish color to the city at the foot of the mountains.  It looked beautiful!   So, we decided to turn around and try to get a better view.  Wow, it was amazing.  The sun was lighting up the mountains and the city in such a way that the mountains looked pink and the city looked golden.  This picture sure does not do justice to the way it REALLY looked.

And this is what it looked like in the opposite direction.

We stayed in this spot until the pink and gold had pretty much faded from the city and then we decided to drive by Jackie's apartment again.  Wow, the sunset with the volcanoes in front looked just beautiful.

After taking that picture above, I got back in the car and not even one minute later, a flock of Canada Geese came flying over our car.  If I had only known, the whole group would have looked magnificent against the backdrop of this picture.  They were making quite a racket as they flew over our car.  It was fantastic!