Travel: Silver City, NM to Albuquerque, NM (day 1)

Monday Feb 20 – President’s Day. Woke up near Silver City, NM at the KOA and drove 3 miles back into town. Stopped at the visitor’s center and walked across the “big ditch” and walked up and down the historic district. Silver City has many old buildings that host galleries, souvenir shops, cafes, etc. One interesting building on main street:

The big ditch is the creek that runs through downtown. It has steps down to a walkway, so we hiked down to take a look:

We drove out of Silver City towards Albuquerque. Our trip took us by a large mining operation. We could see the remnants of a couple of mountains that were ground down and spit back out as terraced mountains. Mining is alive and well in New Mexico.

Coming down out of the mountains, we traveled by a couple of solar panel farms. Then a couple of dairy farms oddly, placed in the middle of the desert. The land was desert, as opposed to farms, until we arrived in Hatch, NM. Hatch is the chili capital of New Mexico. Here is a photo of what appears to be last year’s chili crop. We saw several fields like this, so unsure when harvest might be.

We missed the Very Large ARRAY, which was about 20 miles due west of Socorro. We were headed north, so missed seeing planet earth’s attempts in making contacts with space aliens. From there to Albuquerque, it was uneventful.

We arrived in Albuquerque at Beth’s house in the late afternoon. We discovered that Helen was out of town until the next day. She was visiting Isabel in San Diego. She gave me a box that my friend, Merry, had sent to me all the way from Idaho. (I will open this tomorrow). We talked for a while, then the three of us drove over to Janet & Becky’s house. We ordered pizza and Jim and Becky picked it up and brought it back to the house. Pizza from Il Vicino was delicious.