This is another one of those blog posts to emerge out of the distant past as it’s summer 2022 when I rediscovered the directory of photos that languished for the intervening years. With no notes and no itinerary, we had to rely on Caroline’s sleuthing skills to identify landmarks in our photos.

We knew from the photos that follow that we were in the Chama, New Mexico, area, and you’ll see the reason in the posts for the 4th and 5th of July, but we were initially preoccupied with how this day evolved. Where did we start, and where did we finish?

A body of water helped in that we could scan north-central New Mexico and isolate the area to about 100 miles around Chama.

Not only does she have beautiful eyes, but she has an eye for finding stuff as it relates to maps. Just forget the idea that she’s good about finding her own stuff in close proximity to where she sets things down.

It was this escarpment that turned out to be key and allowed her to verify that we were at the Lake Heron State Park near Los Ojos, New Mexico.

So, maybe our day started in Gallup, Grants, or maybe even Albuquerque, and we’d left the night before to get the bulk of the driving out of the way? Nope, with Gallup only 4.5 hours away from Chama, we’d never have taken so few photos along the route. This can only mean that we were intent on making a lot of miles and simply never stopped so we determined that we had to have begun the day in Phoenix and driven the 495 miles over the course of the entire day.

Update: well, that’s what I thought when I wrote this last paragraph, but then upon consolidating a bunch of Caroline’s and my photos, I discovered a couple of videos Caroline shot from the passenger window of the landscape that shows us traveling north. With the time of the videos being shot at about 7:00 p.m., I’m gonna guess we stayed somewhere between Flagstaff and Winslow, meaning we would have had about a 6-hour drive to Chama, which kind of then makes sense why there were so few photos.

With this out of the way, I can start taking a look at our 4th of July festivities that remained out of sight for the past 13 years.