Sunday is a day of rest, sort of. There was a morning trip to the gym, then the last thing in my job jar, tearing apart a flimsy metal shelf and a 40-year-old, very well-put-together table base. But since then it has been watching the Olympics and now a little NFL football game.
This is the third national monument in 4 days; the first two were free because they honored the Senior National Park Pass. This one required a dollar a head to make a reservation through Recreation.gov, five additional dollars each because it is on BLM land, and then there was $20+tax each for access to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Totally worth it.
We walked the entire 1.2-mile Cave Loop Trail and almost a mile of the Slot Canyon Trail. There was another 1/2 mile left that was blocked off because there was snow and ice covering it, just like at Carlsbad Caverns. Sally took over 70 photos, and I took around 60, including a bunch in vertical format. I narrowed mine down to about 30 and commenced to tweak them. Below are my best 12 with the sign above coming from Sally. Head over to Instagram to see the vertical ones.
The last one is an overview of the park from the Veterans Memorial Park, which was a 4-mile one-way trip further into the pueblo.
My Green Chili Cheeseburger survey results are in, and the winner is Dr. Field Goods. Between this visit and last, I have sampled a half dozen of them, and this is my absolute favorite. Probably 4 of the six were served on a burger bun. Two came wrapped in a tortilla, and this was how the Dr. Field Goods came.
Another day, another National Monument. Today we went north instead of south and visited Bandelier National Monument. We were going to go to Mesa Verde National Park on my November visit, but the government was shut down. This time of year it is too snowy and icy there for a visit, so today was kind of a warm-up for that Mesa Verde visit. There are cliff dwellings in Bandelier, but of a different sort. Visiting the national parks at this time of year is great because they are so uncrowded. While wandering the ruins for over an hour, we saw only one other couple.
Sally has lived in Santa Fe for 3 years and has wanted to go to the Petroglyphs National Monument. Even though the park is a mere 45-minute drive straight down I-25 with a zig to the west before downtown Albuquerque, she’s never been. Today she got to check that box. We went to the visitor center first, even though there are no petroglyphs there. But we wanted to make a pit stop because not all of the 4 different locations have bathrooms. And I wanted to buy a postcard and sticker. From there we rolled down the road a bit to the Rinconada Canyon Unit, which, according to the NPS website, has 300 petroglyphs. Along the 2-mile trail, only the first half along the volcanic escarpment has the petroglyphs. We probably missed quite a few, but what we did see was a lot.
When we got off of I-25 to head towards the Visitor Center, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu. As the route continued, I was almost positive I’d been here before, and when I passed a Dunkin, I knew I had. This is the way I drove last April to Mr. Revlimiter’s house to have him install a set of his gauges in the recently departed ND3 Miata. And had we gone to the Boca Negra unit of the Petroglyph National Monument, I would have passed his house just a couple blocks over.
Back on Saturday my post was about sending in new photos to RadioParadise and I actually tried to do so on Sunday. But that didn’t go so well. I entered eight pictures in the slots provided on the upload page and hit enter. A couple of seconds later I received a 413 Forbidden. Huh? So I tried just one photo and got the same 413 error.
All the photos are in 4K resolution of 3840×2160, and most of them are around 1.5 MB. I speculated maybe there was a 1MB limit. Turns out I had 4 photos, so I tried them one at a time. Each time I received a page that said I had successfully uploaded a file, but there were several lines at the top of the page that said, Warning:Blah, blah, blah.. So I sent in a screenshot next on the upload page.
Yesterday morning I received an email back from Mike V. the RP Photo Editor:
Hi Brian,
I see that you have uploaded several new images to the RP Slideshow. Unfortunately, that is all I can see.
They are having some issues with a new interface for the slideshow, and unfortunately it is not all going to plan. All I can see is a black screen. Therefore, I am unable to accept or decline your photos. Please save them, and as soon as all returns to normal, I will send you an email. I have no idea how long this problem will take to fix.
To be continued…
Preposterous Abundance
*Oh, did I forget to mention that while in Hammond I tried to squeeze the Tucson into a narrow parking spot of a restaurant and scraped the front bumper and fender of her car, all along a parked one? Between her body work and theirs, it will definitely be the most expensive bowl of gumbo I will ever eat.
