Adios Santa Fe

We are leaving Santa Fe this morning and moving down to Albuquerque, actually Bernalillo a suburb north of the city for a week or so.  We will be able to visit with Nancy and CT, Viv, and will see our niece Megan and her family, also two of Jan's cousins, Susan and Mary Beth are coming to visit from PA.  It will be a fun week.  

We got our flu shots while here.  And then we were absolutely rained in for a day.  We were quite surprised with the weather, I guess we're just naive, it absolutely poured, blew, thundered and lightninged, hailed all day long!  And it was hovering around 40 degrees throughout, a great day for staying in and watching a movie on Netflix.  We didn't think it ever did that here in the SW.  It covered the mountains with snow.

We found a great new place to eat, just a food truck, but awesome!  Bang Bite Fueling Station.  It was fairly easy to find and there was a line as we pulled up and parked, always a good sign.  Jan had a Gobble Wobble, a turkey burger with avocado, roasted peppers and goat cheese, and I had a monster, the OMG burger, beef patty with pulled pork, green chile BBQ, and pepper jack cheese.  They were enormous, juicy, delicious, and came with very good fries although we didn't eat much of them.

The "Gobble Wobble" turkey burger

The "OMG" burger, yummy!

We had another great opportunity to do something we had never done, go to a rodeo, and best of all see our nephew, Walker ride a bronc!  The only catch was it was in Los Lunas, NM about 80 miles away.  It was a beautiful day and off we went, met Nancy and CT for lunch along the way.  We got there just as it was starting and actually it was an exhibition for the most part, very small and not at all crowded, perfect for us two rodeo newbies.  We watched a couple saddle bronc rides, a couple bareback rides, several bull riders, some women's calf roping, barrel racing, and then it came to Walker's turn with a saddle bronc.  It was very exciting although his ride wasn't as long as he would have liked.  He had an exuberant horse to say the least and unfortunately lost a stirrup early on.

Here comes Walker!

The horse gets serious immediately

Did I say exuberant?

Oh yeah!

We stopped at Nancy and CT's on the way back for an excellent dinner and some excellent wine to go with the excellent company.

Then there was one more thing to do on Jan and my list and that was to go back to Tent Rocks National Monument for a hike up the slot canyon.  We had done it several years ago and it damned near killed me, but a lot has changed since then:)  So off we went on another gorgeous day and much cooler than it was when we did it previously.  It is a 1.5 mile one way slot canyon trail with a 630' climb to the overlook, so combined with the 1.2 mile cave loop trail we did about 3.65 miles.  It was great!

Even saw a snake

If you ever get a chance to visit, the hike is well worth it.  It is a lot of fun scrambling over the rocks and slipping up the canyon, it is a bit of a real climb to the top, but oh so worth it!