Random musings of a software developer
I spent much of the morning at the Taos Pueblo but not really any photos to show because they don’t really approve of that. They’re nice people, though, and I had some amazing fry bread and green chili.
Next stop was Chaco Canyon and the thousand-year-old ruins found there. At one time over a thousand people lived in this thriving community.
Santa Fe turned out to be a fun city (at least the original/old part of town) with lots of shops, art galleries and cafes/restaurants. Had a quiche and a cafe au lait at the French Pastry Shop & Restaurant there and later, lunch at the Blue Corn Cafe nearby.
A very cool spot to check out is an artistic interactive/mystery sort of place in a converted bowling alley called Meow Wolf. They call it an immersive art installation. The current rendering is named House of Eternal Return and features what appears to be an entire house inside. From inside this house, you gather clues about the whereabouts of the family members. There are a variety of interactive musical pieces like the dinosaur skeleton and opportunities to go inside furniture you wouldn’t otherwise suspect is a portal to another dimension.
Continuing the tour of the Southwest, I visited the Gila cliff dwellings of the Mogollon (c. 13th-15th centuries). The Mogollon people created these by building them up over time and through their hard work, of course. The park allows you to go inside, climb ladders and such.
So, I’m traveling throughout the Southwest for Christmas break—merry Christmas by the way—and I wanted to share some photos of Chiricahua National Monument park, New Mexico. A hoodoo is a column or pinnacle of weathered rock, in case you didn’t know that. And this park is quite full of them on every turn.
Quite a few of the rocks have been weathered down so that a remaining piece stands precariously on top, threatening to fall. It’s interesting to imagine just how long these have been forming.
Wikipedia lists the balancing stone in the third photo above as one of the best examples on the planet.
Next stop appears to be Silver City today which was a booming town in the 19th century and location of the famed Billy the Kid character. (Stay tuned.)
Soon enough, I’ll be hacking some sort of remote shutter thing to my 3D printer and firing off photography from GPIO within a sliced print job. But for now, I’m just getting used to this camera. It’s a Nikon D3200 and these were all through a Nikon AF-S 55-300mm zoom lens, aperture-priority, F/8 on a semi-cloudy day in Pacific Beach with an Insignia UV filter and lens hood.
