What views, what heights, what a machine!

We got up bright and early Friday morning and left at 6am to take a little "drive" up Taylor Mountain before we left Grants to head over to Albuquerque.  Wow, we had no idea how exciting and beautiful it would be.  The map just showed a road that wound around a bit and ended.  Turned out it was about 13 miles up the mountain with about half a decent gravel road and about half a little more challenging all the way up to 11,000 feet!
The sun comes up early out here so it was already up when we left and the shadows and texture it added can't really be shown in the photos, but Jan did her best.

Start of the road

Nearing the top

Looking down in all directions was spectacular, and oh, did I mention it was cold, 43 degrees, nippy.

A few views of the road going up.  I did well, but it wasn't bad just one small section where we were hanging over the side of the cliff:)

The road coming up

We brought coffee and breakfast with us and here's a shot of our "breakfast spot".  Not too shabby, huh?

It was a great morning.  We got back and left for Albuquerque about 1030am.  We were very happy to see diesel, and gas prices for that matter, coming down so much.  We have a 150 gallon tank in the motorhome, so although we can go quite a ways between fill-ups, it does sting a bit when we do!
We filled up just outside of Albuquerque for $3.72 which is the lowest we've seen in awhile, then continued on to our campground, Stagecoach Stop in Bernalillo.

We had a couple things we wanted to do immediately.  One, get the Jeep washed off, we figure we were at that point carrying at least 200 pounds of dirt and dust on it!  And two, pick up our ordered new iPad!

As I've mentioned in the past, we are trying to figure out our computer and internet situation now that I've retired.  We had two laptops, a 15" MacBookPro for me, that I used to carry with me on trips, and a 17" MacBookPro that Jan used mainly for her photography.  Overkill now that I'm not working.  We put my 15" on eBay, and ordered a iPad to be picked up at the Apple Store in Albuquerque.  Slick deal, you go online, order what you want, then specify you want to pick it up not ship it, choose which Apple store you want, walk in, show your order number and ID, and two seconds later, you walk out with your new iPad.  And as all of you that already have one know, it's way cool!

We have quite a few things to do here in the "big" city, the most important one being a visit with Jan's mom, Vivian.  In my next post I'll share a couple of our other projects we'll be doing here as well.