Not much to post from yesterdat...spent most of the day in the town of Cortez to restock supplies, have lunch (pizza), and use the Wi-Fi at the local McDonalds to post blog entries.
Cooked an unusual cut of meat that I picked up at Safeway a few days ago..."Dorado" cut? Anyway, I threw it in a bag with some adobo marinade and it was good...real good.
A few glasses of Portugese red with that...ah...bliss. Then...a Snickers bar for dessert!
Today, I was up early for coffee and cereal. I headed up to the campsite office for a much-deserved luxury...a hot shower. Then drove the ruins road up the mountains to view the Puebloan cliff dwellings. The road up there was a "pants-wetting" eleven mile drive up and along the sides of the mountains...some guardrails...lots of sheer 1000 foot drops. There could only be one choice of music for this ride, so the iPod was banging out the score to the movie "Vertigo". It's one of my favorite movies...Jimmy Stewart gives one of his most complex performances, Kim Novac (my childhood "crush") looks stunning. And the score by Bernard Hermann is perfectly atmospheric. The more I watch this movie, the more I see how deeply flawed and disturbed the character played by Jimmy Stewart becomes as the story proceeds. If you have never seen it, you should rent it...I think that it is Hitchcock's best film.
Anyway, eleven miles later, I'm at the Visitor's Center, then on another ten miles or so to the actual ruins. During the period 600-1300 A.D., Native Americans called Puebloans constructed an amazing series of living quarters, religious "kivas", and others rooms carved into the sides of enormous cliffs. I have to say that the whole thing was stunning. I spent four hours driving around and taking photos at every opportunity. It is possible to take tours and actually get down inside the dwellings...but, since this requires climbing down steps and ladders on the side of the cliffs...hundreds of feet above ground level...there was no way that your "vertigo-afflicted" traveler was attempting that!
So...I'm posting the allowed five photos on this post. And I'm following that with a second, supplemental, post with five more photos.
Man...you have GOT to see this place!!!
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