A journey to the Four Corners

Tim: Yeah, I know...it is about time we got off our lazy backsides and posted on the blog. In reality, our life the last two weeks has been, well, boring. We have done the typical daily trip to the bookstore and have learned a ton of things during those visits. We have also started going to the pool here at the apartment complex on most days. We have taken a couple of days off from this as we got fried one day and needed to recover.

We decided to take a trip the last two days to the four corners area (Candy's so cute in the picture above!). The four corners area is the only area in the U.S. where four states come together at one spot (Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona). The area was very interesting and the mountains were incredibly colorful. Along the way, we drove past the Ute Mountain Tribal Park, which has Chimney Rock, an interesting rock formation that is legendary in the Southwest and similar to Devil's Tower National Park (image I found from web below):

The exact spot of the four corners is on the Navajo Nation area of New Mexico and the park, which is owned by the Navajo, closes at 5 p.m. Well, in typical Tim and Candy fashion, we arrived at 5:45 p.m. The fence said "No trespassing" (see picture below...I acted like I had the key for the lock),

but we decided that we had traveled for seven hours and we were not going away empty handed (so to speak). We joined a lot of other people and walked to the exact four corners spot, which was about half a mile from the fence area. Here is a picture of me playing Twister on the four spots:
After seeing the four corners, we headed to Gallup, New Mexico for the night. On the way, we saw the legendary Shiprock, or Shiprock Peak. It is a rock formation rising nearly 1,800 feet above the high-desert plain on the Navajo reservation, near the town of Shiprock. The name derives from its resemblance to an enormous 19th-century Clipper ship. This is a picture of it I found from the web:
We stayed over night at a Holiday Inn on historic Route 66 in Gallup. This morning, we headed out of Gallup and drove on part of the old Route 66 to Albuquerque, where we briefly visited the Old Town. We have been on this route before back in 2002 on another of our journeys, so it was really just a rehash of that trip.

After Albuquerque, we headed back to Pueblo, which is about five and a half hours from Albuquerque. We drove through Santa Fe on the way home, as well as Trinidad, Colorado. This area of the country is really an incredible area that is almost untouched. On the way, we actually got hail and had a great deal of accumulation., which was very interesting. I guess when you are at 8,500 feet above sea level anything can happen.

The entire trip was around 1,100 miles and was well worth it. Chase was along for the ride again and had a great time, as well. We decided to rent a car for the trip. Our Element has nearly 115,000 miles on it and we figured we give it a well-deserved break.

We promise to start posting more often. We still need to go to Pike's Peak and to the Sand Dunes National Park, so more posts will be coming soon. We only have a month left here in Colorado, so we want to get the most out of it.

Have a great day and we will post again in the coming days!