Bosque del Apache is Spanish for Forest of the Apache or Apache’s Forest. Hector and I had never heard of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge until I read an article about the refuge in Escapees Magazine. With such an intriguing name we couldn’t pass this place up.
We’re now in Tucson, Arizona, having finally reached a warm spot, just in time for Christmas! It’s a stunning background with enormous Saguaro cacti, more on that soon …
We want to take a moment to celebrate this holiday and thank all of our friends and readers for sharing our journey. We hope you are having a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season.
These photos are from the “Luminaria Beach Walk” in Elephant Butte State Park by the town of Truth or Consequences (look it up), New Mexico. I happened to read about this event while we were in the town of San Antonio, New Mexico, about an hour away.
We waited for the warmest day (in the 40’s) during our visit to Albuquerque to drive out to the Indian Pueblos again, this time to visit Bandelier National Monument. Bandelier National Monument is a 33,677 acre U.S. National Monument preserving the homes and territory of the Ancestral Pueblo People. 
We continued our journey south, hoping to escape this harsher than normal early winter weather, with Albuquerque as our next destination.
Our first stop on the way south from Denver was Santa Fe, New Mexico. It probably would have been smarter to continue driving south and get further away from the harsh winter weather we’d been experiencing but we love this city. And we really wanted to spend Thanksgiving in a place that was special to us. Santa Fe was that place.
