Whirlwind Weekend

On May 10th I received a text message from DH saying: "Full solar eclipse soon. In USA" This sent me online looking for information. Finding that it was going to be a full annular eclipse in Albuquerque, NM. This is 7 hours from our home. We thought we might be able to do this. We started looking and the 2 of us decided we wanted to do this. So we did.

I am a planner. I plan dream vacation, trips that we never take but I know how long we will stay at each location how much it will cost us to get to each place. We don't take quick trips. This time we did. 

The joy in it is we had enough time before it that my slow to warm to an idea boy had enough time to while not embracing the trip he did decide that he would rather be with us than stay with his grandparents and his dog. I let him know in no uncertain terms that we were going and we would welcome him with us but there was a safe and loving place that he could stay at if he would rather do that.  I'm so glad he came with us. 

We had a wonderful time. We started in Santa Fe, but left and ended up in Bandelier National Monument, partly because I had read that they were having a ranger talk about the eclipse. We got up there and they had sold out of all the tickets to the ranger talk, apparently weeks ago. I'm glad I didn't know because it was a beautiful place to watch and we found a community of others who had hoped to go to the ranger talk but found each other instead. 

I had bought the solar glasses from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (I told you I'm a planner) I figured even if the rangers had some we could still have our own. There weren't any available and we shared with others around us. It made for a fun evening.  

So how about some pictures?

He was very talkative and lectured anyone who would listen.

I wish with all my heart I had thought to use the tripod we brought with us. Sigh. There is much movement but I think you can get an okay idea of what we saw. It was AMAZING!!!!!

We have such a fun time as a family and The Boy LOVED seeing the pueblo dwellings in the valley at Bandelier. We are already planning our trip back down and plan to include trips to Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, and Sand Dunes(no ancient people but still fun) for later this summer.