We’ve been heading mostly south the last few days towards warmer days and nights and plenty of sunshine. When we got to Albuquerque we had a few missions: 1. Eat at the Frontier Restaurant 2. Check out Petroglyphs National Monument and 3. Find the De Anza Motel.
The Frontier Restaurant is a great place to eat in Albuquerque (not an easy word to type over and over). They make some great New Mexican food here and it’s ready about 3 minutes after you order it. The place is huge and must get mobbed by the U of NM crowd during school, but it was fairly quiet while we were there. Petrogylphs National Monument is a very interesting park on the west side of town where 700 year old rock carvings can be found on the side of a mesa. And, last but not least, the De Anza Motor Lodge is the site of one of the most memorable and infamous Albers’ family vacation stops of the 1980′s.
Luckily, both the Frontier Restaurant and the De Anza are both on old Route 66 just a few minutes apart. If you check out the pictures, you’ll see that the De Anza is obviously not open for business anymore. However, it doesn’t look all that different from when I was there 20 or so years ago! There might even be less ants in the rooms these days! While it was sad to it so run down, it gave us a good laugh…and it’s probably for the best!
We also found time to walk around the old part of town before heading to Coronado State Monument to camp for the evening. They have some very interesting kiva murals at the monument that were worth the trip, but we also got a great tip from one of the folks working there. He gave us directions to some incredible hot springs up in the mountains. It was a 10 mile round trip hike through the snow to get there, but it was well worth it.
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Tags: food, New Mexico