Landscapes
Travel
In addition to exploring from our city bases, we spend fourteen days on the road on our way north onto and east across the Colorado Plateau to Taos, New Mexico. Eight of these nights we camp in stunningly beautiful places, by the Superstition Mountains, along the Verde River, in the Canyon de Chelly, in Chaco Canyon and on the 8000 feet Mesa Verde. Some of these stops require preparation and we organize a 'practice' camp, to allay the fears of novices, earlier against the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson.
Chaco Canyon is forty miles from the nearest shop and the campsite has no drinking water. But the incredible night sky and the architectural remains of the center of an empire are compensation for absent luxuries. Less beautiful nights are spent in motels along the way but there is one night at the Hopi Cultural Center on Second Mesa and most of us sample Hopi food at the "restaurant at the center of the world".