Route 66 Road Trip - Day 7 - Albuquerque, NM

Day 7 of our Spring Break 2012 Road Trip, Wednesday, started out once again with a leisurely morning.  A few of us walked over to IHOP for breakfast, and the girls worked on their scrapbooks again.  We had lunch at the house before taking off on our afternoon excursion.

Albuquerque has a lot to offer for family outings.  We knew we couldn’t see everything, so we chose the ABQ Biopark Zoo.  It was a sunny day, weather close to 70…warmer than it had been since we had been there.  The zoo is not a pleasant place to be on a hot day…gets a little smelly and stifling to me.  This was a very nice zoo, and we took lots of pictures.  I’ll have to be selective about what to put in this blog so as not to make the blog too long.

My all time favorite zoo animal is the polar bear.  This day there were two enjoying the sunshine…one was resting, and one was doing a cat-walk dance, back and forth across the stone bridge.

      We spent a couple of hours at the zoo before heading to Old Town Albuquerque. 

Old Town has a lot of the same flavor as Santa Fe, except I think it’s larger…at least it seemed that way to me.  It is a great place to browse, some indoor shops, some open air shops, and the handmade wares on the sidewalks, all around a central park.

A large cathedral was there on the square.  Another picturesque site…it is very common in New Mexico to drape red chili peppers over doorways, in windows, on fences…just about anywhere.

 

We had supper at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town before heading home for the evening…but we did stop in at a fudge shop before leaving the square!!

One of the Route 66 sites we drove by caught my eye, so I insisted we go back so I could take some pictures.  It’s a historic motor court from the 1930’s…the El Vada Motel.  It’s no longer in business, but I read that the city has taken possession of this motel to avoid losing one of the more distinctive motels along Route 66.  Here are a few snapshots:

    

 

In the picture on the right above, you can see the garages that went with each room…thus a “motor court”, so distinctive to that era.  Also, there used to be an outdoor swimming pool, as you can see in the picture.  Not many motels had swimming pools in those days.

I can’t explain it, but something about the old nostalgic sites really captured my attention on this Route 66 Road Trip.  Maybe it’s an age thing…maybe I longed to go back to that earlier era when things seemed simpler…before we moved into this high technology age, where I can’t seem to stay up with the pace. 

Well, thus ended Day 7 of our spring break vacation.  Back at the house, the girls and I started packing for the trip ahead, leaving in the morning to head back home on Route 66.  The guys relaxed in front of the television, thus ending another good day.

See you again in a few days, with Day 8 – heading back home, with a destination of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the night.