Quick Post from the Plaza Hotel

Hello all!!! We're back in civilization and I will start getting all these pictures and posts together.  We really had fun in Ghost Ranch learning to gather different muds and dirts and make paint from them.  Our teacher was Juanito Jimenez from Santa Fe and the paintings we made are all safely tucked away in the trunk of the car.  I will take photos of them at our next stop.  Our car is quite a bit farther away than normal as we managed to come to the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas NEW MEXICO (not that other place) during FIESTA!!!

So, we've eaten a lot of funnel cake today and something called "ribbon fries" which are made by this guy with a drill that spins a serious-looking little blade that spiral cuts potatoes into potato-chip thin long slices that are deep-fat fried.  Yum!!

So, here are the high points (real posts will follow as I get fully recovered from being in 100 degree heat and camping for the past week in our casita at the Ranch):

In Salt Lake, before we left, we visited the Aquarium, and saw many interesting things... da Creature's favorite by far was the fish you couldn't see at first:

Then, we drove to Moab.  As we sit here right this very minute watching Raiders of the Lost Ark The Last Crusade which filmed the opening shots in Arches, da Creature is shouting out the names of the arches as they showed them on our TV and I am smiling like crazy right now at all the coincidences.

He made Jr. Ranger of course, and of course that's in the car, too.  But more importantly, he managed to hike the trail to Landscape Arch and made it the WHOLE way (this is a big deal for da Creature, because it was a mile and a half round trip).  Here is his shot with da Sister in front of Landscape Arch:

Our first painting lesson at Ghost Ranch was really cool because the teacher made da Creature this picture for him to take home and it was a BISON!

 

 da Sister painted so many pretty things over the week, including a minor detour which involved painting da Creature with luscious sensory silky mud:

There was da Creature's first horseback ride:

And lastly, he got to do dinosaur castings with a REAL paleontologist and made a T-rex TOOTH (which is also in the car):

While the castings were drying, the paleontologist took us into his lab to see the big block he was working on.  Here is da Creature looking through a microscope at tiny baby dinosaur teeth:

I will make posts for all of these highlights when I am better rested.  In the meantime, we are resting in Las Vegas NM and will head to Roswell tomorrow.  It seems like a lifetime since we left home, and yet it seems like the end of our adventure is so close.  Bittersweet and wonderful, we head to Carlsbad tomorrow!  Later all!