Well that was a heck of a vacation. Unfortunately it’s over, but I suppose that’s inevitable. Let’s see… How to summarize. I can’t get TOO detailed, we did too much stuff and I would be rambling on forever. Plus I’ve got 240-some-odd pictures to sort through and post, so that’ll take a while too. Oh well I’ll just dive in and ramble away.<\/p>\n
I took Gabe up to a boarding facility called Country Kennels<\/a> on Wednesday morning, since he’s too high-maintenance to just have somebody drop by the house and check on him occasionally. They boarded him when he was with the Rescue<\/a> so they all know him and were excited to get to see him again. We worked all day, then flew out around 6:30 to get our vacation started. Incidentally, I don’t guess I mentioned, we were going to Albuquerque to visit our friends David and Jill, who we met during our Texas foray. We’ve been there a couple of times to visit, and as it turns out they might be moving to Chicago so that might be our last trip to N.M. Anyway, Jill picked us up at the airport and we headed over to their house, where we gabbed for a while then turned in early. I’ll throw Thursday in this paragraph too since it was relatively uneventful; David and Jill had to work so we just kind of checked out the town and stuff. When they got home David grilled up some awesome fillet mignons… Now THAT’S eatin’.<\/p>\n Friday we started getting down to some vacation action. We drove up to the base of the Sandia<\/a> mountain range, and took the tram ride. Their son Grant was on leave from the Marines for the weekend, so he came along too. I conveniently provided that link to the website about the mountains so you can read about them; That way I don’t have to type it all in here. It’s billed as the longest tram in the world; Pretty awesome ride. There’s a restaurant at the top where we had a drink, then walked around a while and headed back down. For dinner we headed to El Pinto<\/a> restaurant. Now that’s some killer feed… And as an added bonus it’s Green Chile season, so the chiles were extra fresh. Man, those things are everywhere down there; they sell them for practically nothing too. I’d put them somewhere in my top five foods probably. Last time we visited Albuquerque I carried home a big burlap bag of them, but didn’t feel energetic enough for that this time. Plus, they’re just better fresh<\/i>; I don’t really buy into the freezing bit. Guess it’s better than canned.<\/p>\n Saturday for our vacation diversion, we headed out to Sky City<\/a>. Again, I have provided a informational link to relieve myself of any excess typing. The Acoma Indians live there, and it is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States. They duped me into the drive by telling me it was only 45 minutes, but it was really more like an hour and a half. Oh well, it was worth it. Now for dinner this<\/i> night, we went to Sadie’s<\/a>. We were having a little show-down between this place and El Pinto. There wasn’t a real clear-cut winner though; They are both awesome. I’d say Sadie’s was a little higher on the “Sweaty Bald Head” scale though. I wore a ball cap to try and maintain some appearance of normalcy, but it was breached pretty quickly.<\/p>\n Let’s see… That takes us to Sunday. The “event of the day” on Sunday was the Bernalillo Wine Festival. Oddly I can’t find a link to this event so I’ll have to briefly describe it myself. Good grief. Bernalillo is a quaint lil’ town right off the Rio Grande river, with a nice view of the Sandia Mountains. Great place to have a festival and walk around sipping wine all afternoon. We stayed there several hours but eventually the heat and crowd wore us out. I left with a nice little sunburn on the back of my neck, complete with a nice glaring white strip from my camera strap. Revenge of the Nerds hits New Mexico. Luckily it blended in a little after a while. I’m sure you’ve noticed a pattern by now; The next order of business was dinner. We talked David into doing fillet mignons again. Grant invited over 3 of his friends, and we had a veritable “fillet buffet”. Apparently David was trying to burn us out on the steaks so he wouldn’t have to fix them again the next night; He grilled enough for everybody to have seconds<\/i> on the fillets. Obscene, but true. It was quite an exercise in gluttony.<\/p>\n