The Roadtrip Begins

Our vacation is finally here. Noelle and I have been anxiously anticipating our last roadtrip before we have a baby. Some people might call it a "babymoon", but we just call it another excuse for an adventure. Last night after work we changed and packed up the last essentials for our trip before hitting the road. We stopped for dinner in Roswell before continuing northwest to Grants, New Mexico. We spent the night at a hotel in Grants and woke up this morning ready for the first stop of our trip.

Our first stop was some Ancestral Puebloan ruins between Grants and Gallup called the Casamero Pueblo Ruins.

It is an interesting site on BLM lands. Casamero is considered a Chacoan outlier and it features a similar style of masonry. The red sandstone cliffs that surround the ruins are spectacular in their own right.

After exploring the ruins and reading about them on the interpretive panels we were ready to move on to our next stop.

Our next stop was across the Arizona border on the Navajo reservation at the tribal seat of government at Window Rock. We went to see the town's namesake rock formation, a large, circular arch formed in the sandstone.

The park in which the arch is located also features memorials to Navajo veterans of war and the famous Code Talkers that helped the US military immensely during WWII by developing a code that the Japanese could not crack.

From Window Rock we headed further west then south to Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. The trading post is one of the longest operating Indian trading posts in the US. We went into the Hubbell home for a look around and then explored the grounds for a bit before eating lunch and moving on.