17 June 2024 – Trip Day 78
18 June 2024 – Trip Day 79
Ed: This entry is a bit different, as we visited the same site over two days as we were split up. Alan and Evan visited the site on the 18th.
Today we relocated from Albuquerque to Farmington, New Mexico. The drive was pretty straight forward. Along the way, there was a sign for the Aztec National Monument and Meagan took a detour there with the kids.
Stopping for gas at the Sinclair station. We dubbed them the ‘Stinky’ stations because when Jarek was a toddler, he got a stuffed dinosaur from one of them on a cross country move and it was named ‘Stinky”.
Set up in the site. Not much greenery and lots of pavement and stone. It was very hot here as well, regularly in the 100s.
A map depicting the Chocoan or Pueblo culture sites. The sites, depending on where you got, have various names attributed to them.
Approaching the Great Kiva.
Unlike the smaller kivas, which were normally entered through a ladder in the roof, the Great Kiva had stairwell that went down into it.
Evan stands in the restored Great Kiva for a sense of scale.
The roof of the Great Kiva.
The Great Kiva from the outside.
Jarek and Arya work on their books inside the Great Kiva while Randal looks on.
A nice cool place to run around – awesome!
The site contains other kivas as well, but not at the same scale as the Great Kiva.
Part of the structure was available to walk through. These were the doorways used by the Puebloans to connect rooms. It was thought that these were more for air flow than for people movement, as the assignment / ownership of rooms tended to run from the front of the building straight back, and would be accessed from the roof, although occasionally they would have doors facing the plaza.
Randal approved!
Offered a choice of style, Evan picks out his Junior Ranger badge.
Evan got a milkshake as a Daddy Day treat on the way back home.
Meanwhile, back at the RV, Jarek and Garrett process lemons to make lemonade.
Beating the heat, I set up the stove outside to cook tacos for dinner. We’ve really leveraged the outside cooking with the RV. There is only so much heat capacity that the ACs can remove, and once you put in the heat energy from cooking dinner, it takes a long time, and only after it cools down / the Sun goes down do we recover.
Of course with the desert heat, night is the best time to be outside. Randal plays while Garret has gotten a hold of a phone and proceeds to take many, many candid photos.
A contemplative selfie…
Out for a midnight bike ride.
Randal does his new favorite thing – putting things into things. One of our best toys – a cardboard box and some gravel rocks!
Thanks for reading!
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