Posts in Category: United States
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Bandelier National Monument – Visit in Late Fall
My strategy in visiting a major attraction is always to visit during the shoulder season if possible. There will be far fewer people around, the price may be cheaper and the weather is usually still cooperative. In high season in summer you might be baking in a place like New Mexico, while in the late […]
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Albuquerque Museum – Best in New Mexico
In a previous post I wrote about how Alison and were blown away by the El Paso Museum of Art during out stay in the city for the 2019 SATW conference. Frankly, we had not been prepared for such a fine display of art in what is an unfairly overlooked city by tourists. After the […]
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White Sands – New Mexico’s Snowy Desert
Our journey through New Mexico continues with a stop at Roswell, site of the alleged crash of an alien spaceship in 1947. The International UFO Museum & Research Center sounds like a pretty serious institution, but in reality is actually a hokey tourist trap with plenty of photo ops with ETs of all kinds. From […]
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Carlsbad Caverns – Absolutely Nothing Like It
I’ve been visiting caves and cave systems around the world for many decades and thought I had seen some of the best, for example the caves of Nerja, Spain which I wrote about in this post and described as phantasmagorical, which they are. But, until you’ve been to Carlsbad Caverns and experienced the excellent way […]
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Guadalupe Mountains N.P. – Smith Springs Hike
For such a large state, Texas has surprisingly few national parks; only two in fact – Big Bend which opened in 1944 and the much newer Guadalupe Mountains which only opened in 1972. After the recent SATW conference in El Paso, Alison and I set out to explore west Texas before moving on to New […]
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Hueco Tanks S.P. – Great El Paso Day Trip
We had just wrapped up a great SATW conference in the west Texas city of El Paso that I wrote about in this post and the plan was to do some exploring in the immediate area before moving on to Guadalupe Mountains National Park and then New Mexico. A little online research quickly revealed that […]
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Fort Sumner – America’s Unfinest Hour?
After visiting White Sands National Monument, I went to Fort Sumner, New Mexico to visit Billy the Kid’s grave and instead found a far more important story, that of Bosque Redondo and the forced ‘Long Walk’ of the Navajos and the confinement of the Mescalero Apaches. It was one of the lowest points in history […]
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El Paso – Be Prepared to be Surprised
When El Paso was announced as the 2019 SATW conference site in Barbados in 2018, I know a few eyebrows went up. After all this organization has been hosted by New Zealand, China, Iceland, Germany, Mexico, Bermuda and a number of much bigger American cities to name only a few. Was El Paso, at less […]
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Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument
We had just wrapped up our visit to southeastern New Mexico with a visit to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands National Monument and it was now time to start heading southwest. Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in southwest New Mexico is not easy to get to, but well worth the effort as you will be […]