Day 8: Albuquerque to Santa Fe to Mesa Verde

Another morning packing up our camp into the van. After a short drive to Santa Fe, we walked around Old Town and found a great restaurant for lunch, The Shed. It's tucked back into a little plaza and has lots of very short doors and uneven floors and mismatched tables and chairs. Charming in its disarray.

Our appointment at the Georgia O'Keefe museum was not diappointing. O'Keefe's abstract art was on display, with some of the paintings never being on public display before. Our docent led us through 60 years of art, starting with early experimentation through classic O'Keefe style to later efforts to just keep painting, despite blindness and arthritis. We then went across the road to the Museum's learning center and spent 45 minutes capturing our feelings with paper and chalk pastels.

After a little more shopping (doing our best to boost the American economy) we loaded into the van to drive to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. As we got to Durango, it was clouding over and getting cooler. We went up over 2000 feet in elevation getting to our campsite and as we put our tents up in the first few moments of darkness it was getting cold and a little rainy. So we all crawled into our sleeping bags to get warm and sleep.