Monday, April 28, 2014

Breaking Bad and UFOs

We've been trying to leave Elephant Butte for a while now but we keep going back.  The South Monticello Point campground is probably my favorite place we've ever stayed. Larry's, too. It's just so beautiful and peaceful there. It gets a little crowded on weekends but the spaces are so far apart there is still a lot of privacy and the campground clears out on weekdays.

We're in Socorro now, at Escondido Lake. We were planning just a quick stop here on our way over to Bottomless Lakes near Roswell but now we're thinking about going back to Monticello Point again. We just bought fishing licenses and thought that might be a good place to fish but mostly we both just love it there so much, we're having trouble leaving.

We headed up to Abuquerque a few weeks ago. We had been out in the middle of nowhere so long that the city was kind of overwhelming. We had a lot of little city type errands to run-banking, Trader Joe's, etc-so we didn't do a lot of sightseeing. We've been to Albuquerque several times but had never  been to Old Town so we decided to go there this trip. I loved the old buildings and the art but it is very touristy. Most of the pictures today are from there.

Old Town Plaza



Rattlesnake Museum


San Felipe de Neri (built in 1793)

Albuquerque has a whole tourism industry built around the show Breaking Bad. We both love that show. We saw Breaking Bad merchandise everywhere and recognized a lot of the filming locations. There are tours you can take to see all the major locations and there are also maps online for self-guided tours. We felt funny about going to look at people's houses but we did check out a couple of locations. The online map we used told us which ones didn't like people taking pictures so we stayed away from those. (I like to see where things were filmed for some reason. It's kind of a weird hobby of mine.)

Tuco's headquarters

Walter White's house



We haven't been doing much in Socorro. It has been very windy so we've been mostly just hanging out here at Escondido Lake hoping to get in some fishing. One of the most famous and well-documented UFO sightings took place here in Socorro 50 years ago last Friday. We found this mural commemorating Officer Zamora and the sighting.

I was never really into UFO stuff so I had never heard of this incident but Larry had. I looked it up and it was pretty interesting. (link) It's considered to be one of the more legitimate sightings because several people, including the police officer, saw the object and there were burn marks in the field where they said it had landed before taking off again. I'm actually kind of surprised this incident didn't get as much attention as Roswell. New Mexico has so many strange things like this. I love it.

We haven't seen any UFOs but we did see this beautiful full moon over Elephant Butte Lake so I'll end this with a picture of that. Hope everyone is having a wonderful Spring!