Day 34: Durango, CO


Thursday 10/5
Checking the weather forecast and talking with our daughter in California where it is very cold, the next thunderstorm is obviously hitting us any soon. We take I-25 towards Albuquerque. Based on the info’s we had is Albuquerque just an ordinary industry type city and we plan to skip it and go straight to Durango. But as so often, people fly in and out of places without having the chance to uncover some of the beauties. As we are so close to town we decided to make the detour and drove downtown. Old Town Albuquerque is definitely worth visiting. Similar to Santa Fe the old town has a lot of little pueblo type buildings, one of the oldest mission in the country and a very nice plaza. While Santa Fe feels very much like an esoteric Mecca, Albuquerque is just a very cute old town surrounded by a very modern city at the Rio Grande. We liked Albuquerque a lot. We go onto Hwy 550 and drive up to Durango. As we leave Albuquerque the scenery changes quite a bid. The rolling hills change to red rock cliffs and it feels more and more like the scenery from one of the western movies. The light changes dramatically as we see the black clouds reaching out to us very quickly. We cross the Animas river, which is pretty much completely dried out – except some water pits.
On our way to Durango we try to make reservations. Here it is even worst. The coming weekend is a great horse and cowboy show. We get a room for 2 nights but nothing for Saturday. We may need to stay one night elsewhere. We arrive in Durango late in the afternoon while the weather is still nice and we stroll through the old town and have dinner in the Franciscan a very nice Mexican food restaurant.

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