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On my way down to Albuquerque, it's 465 miles, I took some pictures of the mountains along the way. I cropped one of Mt. Elbert, or one of those fourteeners in the Collegiate range, and used it for the header on my blog. The picture started out really big and screwed up but I was working on it at Joe's house and he saw me having a fit about not getting it to come out right, so took my laptop and fixed it for me. I watched him do it, but there's no way I could repeat whatever he did. Anyway, I wanted to describe where that picture was taken. I don't know how many fourteeners, mounntains that are 14,000 feet or higher, in the Collegiate Range but there are a lot. It's a really spectacular drive.

Visit to my son, Joe, and Amanda

I had a nice long visit with Joe and Amanda. Too bad my grandsons weren't there, but they went to a concert in Santa Fe with their mom and back to Taos. Friends are getting to be a big thing in their lives, to the exclusion of others... like grandmothers. that's OK. I got to spend more time and attention on Joe and Amanda instead. Still, Jojo's dog, Diego, missed him. Because of that, I had a dog that was really hard to shift sleeping in my bed while I was there.

It was HOT in Albuquerque. 96 degrees yesterday. there's a public swimming pool close to Joe's house so we went swimming a lot. Walden may be really back of beyond, but at least it's cool here.

southwestern heat

The Arkansas River was running bankful. I saw lots of rafters parked along the highway getting ready to float the rapids on my drive down through the San Luis Valley on my way to New Mexico. Snow melt from the Collegiate Range was running off in a lot of small creeks and rivulets. the Rio Grand here in Albuquerque is almost out of its banks and muddy brown. It made the long trip down through Colorado along the Continental Divide pretty interesting to experience springtime in the Rockies like that. At one point I thought the runoff looked about to wash over the highway.