Chaco Culture National Park

We had an amazing day today and hiked over 7 miles through ruins.  It's so mindblowing to think that we touched stone walls that were created over 1000 years ago. Who built the wall? Man, woman ?  What was his/her name and what was their story ?   Looking at the pictographs I wonder who made them and what the artists were trying to tell us.  Some of the pictographs were up so high we wondered how the artists got up that high on the rock face.  It was so hot but we didn't sweat, or if we did it evaporated immediately.  We talked as we hiked but at times we just were silent, lost in our own thoughts about the past.  The pictures really document our hike.  We started at about 11am and got back to the car at 6pm.  It was only 7 miles but we kept stopping to take pictures and take in the scenery.  After the hike we headed out for dinner.  We are really able to conserve money by eating the breakfast included with our hotel, snacking on nuts, fruit, and cliff bars for lunch, and only having to buy one meal per day.  We ate at a little cafe in Bloomfield called Triange Cafe.  The interior seemed to be from sometime in the 50's !  The food was ok, but filling.  I had told Rachael that there were lots of people in the midwest that probably had never seen the ocean.  She didn't believe me so she asked our waitress and the clerk.  The waitress who was in her 60's had been to the beach in California once when she was a child, and the clerk, probably in her early 20's had never seen the ocean.  Rachael was shocked.  I remined her that it was only a few years ago that she had seen snow for the first time.  The world is so big, yet so small.  As I have never been out this way before I am surprised at how much there is to see out here.  I don't think I realized how large the United States is nor how diverse it's landscape and people.  We see a lot of Native Americans here but few, if any, black people.  There are also very few Asians here.  At the Information Center of the park, we met a couple who were from, of all places, Jacksonville, FL.  The man is an English Teacher at Englewood-- Which was the high school just 2 blocks away from where I lived in Florida !   Looking at the calendar, we have been gone less than 2 weeks yet we feel as if we have been gone a long, long, time.   Well, that's all for tonight... very tired, and the adventure continues tomorrow !

Today's pictures can be found at: https://plus.google.com/photos/104423898538711271791/albums/5759309678317126705?authkey=CPPG4pWy48is-gE