Megan’s Take
Today was primarily spent visiting the three sites within the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument – Quarai, Gran Quivira, and Abó. Gran Quivira was probably our favorite site for how extensive the pueblo ruins are,
but I also really liked Quarai (the title image) – church ruins plus a beautiful 1 mile hike on the Spanish Corral trail. Abó was our last adventure stop of the day. We were hot, tired, and hungry, and we didn’t have enough time to see it all before heading to Mass. I think that overshadowed our experience there and put it lower on our list.
Emmett and Emilia seemed to really enjoy the ruins. I struggled to keep them close at times, because their imagination was fired up wandering through all the “mazes” of ruins. They wanted to take off and run through them. I was worried about rattlesnakes and a couple places where they could fall from a height if they got out of sight. But at least they were good about not climbing on the ruins. We bought tour guide booklets for a couple sites that provided descriptions for numbered stops, and they enjoyed the scavenger hunt to find the numbers among the ruins.
After afternoon Mass at a mission Church in Willard, the kids played at the campground in Manzano Mountains State Park while Phil made dinner in the camper. We lucked out that Emmett and Emilia made camping friends – a little boy almost exactly Emmett’s age (off by 2 days) and twin 9 yr old girls who scooped Emilia under their wings and played with her, including a game called “wild girls” where they all pretended to live off the land. (She loved that imaginative play so much that she talked about “wild girls” for an hour after we said goodnight to the friends.) This trip is not “relaxing”, and sometimes there is friction in the transitions or when we’re tired. But we are having so many adventures.
Phil’s Take
We’ve seen our fair share of Pueblo ruins on the 2025 Sabbatical trip, at Mesa Verde National Park and Hovenweep National Monument, but the ruins we saw today are very different. While they do have kivas, much like the ones we saw before,
the Spanish influence, missions, churches, and different landscape make it worth the visit. I also felt like these areas delved more into their culture, whereas Mesa Verde was more about how they lived. It was very interesting to read the explanations of how there were kivas near the churches and how the church tolerated their traditional ceremonies to some extent.
I do think my favorite of the places we went to is the Gran Quivira, as it seemed the most interesting settlement. It was set on top of a hill with the most extensive excavation.
What was most interesting is showing how complex their buildings were, with one spot showing multiple floors in the building. This was probably 15 feet deep.
The plaques along the way combined with the exhibits in the visitor centers give a huge amount of cultural background and history to what was going on here. I took pictures of most of the plaques out near the ruins.
I also managed to catch a mileage milestone, which I would normally miss. This is just too important to leave out.
It’s hilarious that the song showing on the dash there is Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins.
It was really cool that we had a campsite next to kids that our kids could play with. I think it is going to be hard for Emilia to grasp that she may never see them again. It’s like that person you have a conversation with next to you on some random flight that you know you’ll never see again, but they have that innocence.
Also, the battery and solar panels worked amazingly well. We used about 50% of overall capacity overnight, and it charged to full during the day easily. I did discover that we were low on propane, so we ran the fridge off of electric as much as we could until going to bed. That fridge uses something like 300W, which is huge considering that the rest of the camper, sound machines, phone charger, fan, etc. was around 140W total. I think it actually isn’t very efficient because it is made to run on propane also. The fridge outside (kind of a dorm room sized fridge) uses maybe a tenth of the power.
Some improvements would be to power the 12V stuff directly from the solar power bank rather than going from battery to AC and then back to DC. That’s two conversions that are both lossy, and most of the things we use that are low power run off of 12V. These are all adjustments to make in the future, but if we have downtime, I do have wire and tools.
Here’s the gallery for today.
Really interesting places!