Day 9

Sorry this entry is out of order but the last couple of days have been both frustrating & fun. Frustrating because Google has been going up & down, affecting our ability to post entries in order, so one was entered out of order. Fun because we headed out of Santa Fe, thru Taos Pueblo, a beautiful, ancient community with proud & friendly inhabitants, selling us goodies and telling us about their families. We headed over the still-snowy mountains and found ourselves in a crazy/cool off-the-grid community called EarthShip. Some of the houses looked like solar fairy castles, then I blinked, and they were gone! We were in a hurry to get to Mesa Verde where we camped among lots of younger folk (it was the weekend, after all), got to know the women @ the campground store a little too well (they had Wi-Fi there, showers, and tons of great info). We took 2 tours that were as different as night & day: the first was an afternoon tour of the Cliff Palace, given by a funny park ranger who knew the answer to all the questions we asked & then some. He also knew how to encourage visitors' respect for the monumental effort that went into creating and maintaining this beautiful place. On the last day we were there, we were a part of a smaller group, early in the day, and learned from our Bostonian-accented park ranger all about the theories of how & why the place worked and then why the Ancestral Puebloans (don't call them Anasazi; that's a Navajo word!) left. The second tour was a lot more challenging physically, too-- climbing tall ladders & squeezing thru secret hallways-- so you could really get a feel for living at the place. Too soon we had to leave for Moab, because it's a pretty long drive and we needed to be at our host stop by a certain time... we made it w/5 minutes to spare, but more about that in my next post, OK?