Mesa Verde!

We followed around a group of British sports car enthusiasts and took pictures for my dad.  He has an E Type Jag like this one and an MGB like some we saw tooling around.

(This is Day Two...scroll down to start at the beginning if you wish.)  Mesa Verde was our main destination for this trip.  Having never been to the area, we searched all the surrounding towns for lodging and finally settled on Cortez, and a cute little family-owned hotel that had good reviews.  The owners were nice enough to give us two rooms for $99!  That's a big deal for the Dopps, who typically pile up in one room.  This time, for some reason, I told the motel people how many kids we actually have, and they wouldn't let us do one room, but made us a deal on two.  It was a luxury, I tell ya!  Golda and Ruby loved having their own room to spread out it, and Ptolemy was OK not sleeping under the desk, once we convinced him that a bed is fun, too.

By the way, did I tell you that Freestone and Xanthe didn't go with us?  You know we always have to leave someone behind because the car only seats 8, and Freestone was the easy choice because he flat-out refused to go, claiming that he could not and would not go to one more national park.  Then Jennie invited Free and Xanthe to the cabin with them.  It took Xanthe a full 24 hours to weigh her options, and she opted for a couple of days with Coco and Bill and a couple of days at the cabin in Idaho with Izzy.  Thanks, everyone!

 So Scott and I, together with our seemingly small group of five, set out to explore some 12th century ruins.  I am so glad we went in the fall, because the landscape was practically glowing.  The mesas were on fire with color.  The palette of rusts, oranges, yellows, greens and browns, with the red dirt and blue sky, was a balm to our souls.

 Wait for me!  Wait for me!

 And this is what we came to see!  I don't know how the National Parks Service does it, but their websites make the most thrilling things seem entirely unappealing.  Check it out anyway, if you're thinking of going.  And I hope you're thinking of going!  Tziporah wasn't happy about waiting for the guide.  She wanted to lunge down the hillside helter skelter.

 We started our tour of the Cliff Palace looking down on it, then hiked down into it with a guide who told us the background of the people who lived here, what their lives were like, what may have happened to them, how the dwellings were discovered, and how they have been restored since 1908, when two cowboys happened upon them.

 Even Miss Helter Skelter listened.

 Here's some ranger humor for you:  our guide had a "Cliff's Notes" for the Cliff Palace to illustrate that the hour we spent with her was just a snippet of the whole story of the Ancestral Puebloans, or the Aztec.  Even in modern times, the Elders will take the young men and tell them the oral history of their people as a rite of passage.  It takes four days to tell the whole story.  The condensed version we heard was resplendent with symbolism and a deep respect for the earth.

 Here's Tizzy, bolting up the exit stairs next to a steep drop-off down to the ravine bottom.  She stopped to pose for a picture, carefully sitting down and smiling.  She didn't want to hold anyone's hand.  She would say, "I'm holding onto my clothes, gripping her pant legs in her hands as if that was going to save her from a tumble.

The way out of the dwelling was via stairs and three ladders.  The park service warned that the hike was strenuous, but it wasn't.  Hard on the knees, yes, but involved maybe five minutes of exertion total.

 We shared a picnic in the park with a blue bird and a chipmonk.  And this creature.

 This is a temple the Puebloans were building when they left, and it was never completed.  We think they left because of a drought, and joined other tribes to the south.  Our guide told us that she had visited the descendents of the Ancestral Puebloans, the Zuni tribe.  She posed the question to one elder, "Why did the ancestors leave Mesa Verde?"  He said, "Because it was time."  A very Zuni answer, the guide said.  But the elder went on the explain that Mesa Verde was never meant to be their destination, even though they stayed for 700 years.  They were meant to move on in their search for the Center Place, where the Zuni believe they live today, in New Mexico.

 That's where we went.

 And this is another cliff dwelling we hiked into, called the Spring House, I think.  The guided hike was $4 a person, and well worth it, but there are other dwellings that are free to hike to without a guide.

 We got to go down into a kiva and see how the people would have lived.

 A kiva without a roof.  It would have had a roof on it, so that people could spend time on top of it, at ground level, grinding corn and preparing food.  The large hole in the floor is for the fire.  The little barrier to the right of it blocks the fresh air that comes down through a flue to the far right.  the tiny hole in the floor is for spirits to enter this world. for that's how the Puebloans believed our spirits get here from the world below.

 When you bring extra clothes on trips for babies, you shouldn't leave them at the motel.  They're not as effective that way.  Happily, Tziporah was delighted to wear her swimsuit after she had an accident.  We spent the whole day at Mesa Verde, as we had planned.  I'm glad we had an entire day there, because you almost couldn't do it justice in less time.  There is a great museum, visitors center, and the drive around the mesa top to various sites.

We sat outside at a local carhop eating burgers for dinner and turned in early to our comfy motel.  Ptolemy said later that his favorite part of the trip was the motel.  Our pace was slower this trip than the usual Dopp vacay, which turned out to be nice.  Lots of time to rest.  Here's a link to the motel, not because it was the Four Seasons, but because it's hard to find a clean, affordable place in some of these areas, and this one was both.

The next morning, if I had thought of it, and been my usual manic self, I would have gotten up at the crack of dawn to drive 30 miles to Four Corners, that monument on Navajo Nation land where you can stand in four states at once.  I didn't think of it, however, and I'm sad we were so close and didn't go, but there is so much we didn't see in the Four Corners are that we'll have to go back to cover it all, anyway.  We didn't go to Durango, for example, or Hovenweep National Park, or the Ute reservation, where the Utes take you on a tour of their cliff dwellings.  And on the way home, we drove RIGHT past a national park that we hadn't even heard of, Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  I could have used my pass!  Dangit!

 Anyway, instead of getting up at 6, we slept until 7 and then Scott and I and Tziporah sat outside at this kitchy little place, watching Cortez come and go, while the other kids packed up to go to Telluride.  We missed Xanthe and Freestone, but having five kids is strangely easy.  Even when one of them is Tizzy!