New Mexico Road Trip - We're Going on a Quest

Friday, October 11, 2024

This trip started modestly enough; we decided to rent a condo in Santa Fe, New Mexico for a few days and invite some friends to join us.  One of the couples is recovering from a serious health problem so we figured it would be a longshot if they were able to join us, and it turned out the other couple already had plans for that time.  Maybe we should have checked everyone’s availability before we booked the condo.

We could have cancelled the rental, but Val and I really wanted to visit Santa Fe and New Mexico again as we haven’t been there for a while, and it’s one of our favorite places.  Val had bought a book called “Scenic Driving New Mexico: Exploring the State’s Most Spectacular Back Roads” by Laurence Parent, and she said, “why don’t we see how many of these we can do?” and the quest was on.  We got out a map of New Mexico and highlighted all the scenic drives and mapped out a route that would take us pretty much all around the state covering most of the scenic drives, and then the serious planning began.

There are thirty-five scenic drives listed in the book, and we already know we won’t do all of them.  At least two of the drives are too far out of the way of our loop, and we’ve already driven them during a past visit.  If we do everything we are planning, it will take us about four weeks to complete so it will be a long road trip.  We haven’t done this long of a road trip in a while, and it will entail driving almost every day, so we don’t know whether we’ll hold up for the whole way or not.  It will be interesting to see how a couple of 76-year-olds handle it, but we’ll do what we can, and we have the option to head home anytime we want to.

Here is a picture of our route planning map.  The scenic drives are all of the colored lines (the colors don't mean anything, they were just meant to differentiate each drive).

Val and I are really looking forward to this trip, but as usual this blog won’t be published until we get home.  I just don’t feel like advertising the fact that our house will be empty that long.  Anyway, it’s just about time to hit the road and start out quest.