This morning we got up and went down into the valley to see the ruins. With limited parking in the valley the county is paying for a bus shuttle system to ensure people keep coming to the park. My guess is there may be 30 – 40 parking spaces at the parks visitors center. Visitors can drive their own cars into the park before 9:00 a.m. and after 3:00 p.m. We left the campground at 8:30 and drive to the visitor’s center, there were about 20 available parking spaces. The shuttle system allows 100’s of people a day to be in the park. The shuttle starts at a county visitor’s center in White Rock, NM. They have a lot of parking spaces for visitors and even spots to park your RV. The RV spots have power available for $20.00 a day if you’d like to leave the A/C running. The A/C is important if you have a pet who can not ride into the park on the bus. This a really great idea. The $20.00 will than allow you to stay in this RV parking area over night.
Jean and I spent 3 hours walking along the interruptive trail viewing the ruins: ( when I get some pictures formatted I’ll post them HERE ). Pictures from today start half way down the page.
View from camp.
These were large villages with over 1200 rooms at one of the 4 sites.
This is a drawing of what the village might have looked like:
Some of the rooms where rather large.
This is where they think this kiva was and some of it rebuilt.
And of course there are always lizards:
I also got him out on the side walk, Look at the length of his rear toes.
There is a lot of pottery around these sites and it is illegal to remove anything from the sites, so people place the things they find on flat rocks.
We are still moving east and are now at Bluewater Lake State Park just off of I-40 west of Albuquerque, NM.
Here is our drive around Winslow, we were also out looking for a laundromat.
I had planned a stop in Flagstaff to do our grocery shopping at a SuperWalmart however that did not work out so well. I have read a lot of blogs about how unfriendly Flagstaff is to RV’ers and they again proved it to be true on all accounts. It was difficult to find the store because of no signage. We saw a large brown building with a large parking lot and figured it to be the Walmart. When got right to the turn lane we could see the four foot high Walmart sign at the parking lot entrance. However, I could not see a good path into and out of the parking lot. One of the challenges of pulling a car is you can not back up. If I get myself into a place where I can not make a turn I’d have to stop unhook the car and then backup. I actually have had to do this once. We were on Hwy 50 (out in the middle of nowhere) half way across Nevada when we stopped for lunch at a pony express historical site. The parking lot was empty and I thought I could make a large circle and make it out the only entrance point. I was wrong, unhooked the car, backed up three feet and made the turn J. Back to Flagstaff Walmart, the parking lot was so broken up the curbs and light posts I was not sure I could get in and out with all the tight turns and other vehicles in the lot. After driving around the area looking for a place to park we decided to move on down the road.
The campground is about a half mile down hill from the town.
Some of the information about the town points out the town is on one of the many ground faults. This is not a very good picture however you can still see how the rock is twisted.
This picture is looking down onto the town. It was interesting and Jean and I had a good time. Spent the afternoon enjoying the heat, 95 I think was the high.
We are in site A8 and part of A9.
There is only 25 to 30 feet between the power and water poles. The park information says they have 265 sites and we are one of 5 people tonight. The park ranger said they should be sold out this weekend.
We have reached summer, it was 95 today and I got a strawberry drink.
