my travels in pixels

Canyon de Chelly National Park, Arizona When we arrived in Canyon de Chelly (d’shay) two weeks ago there had been a ranger talk that night and a ranger walk the next day, but because we couldn’t drive our truck we missed out on both of them. Now the next ranger walks are not for two weeks due to staff shortages, so we miss out again. This national monument is on Navajo reservation land and observes daylight saving while the rest of Arizona does not. So we were a bit confused as to the right time to see sunrise and sunset. My photography app showed nearby towns with and a different current time and a different time for sunrise and sunset to what we had been told. Reality was somewhere in between. People have lived here for over 5,000 years. The current inhabitants are the Navajo, who first arrived in 1700 only to be captured or killed before or during the long 300 mile walk of 1863 when the land now known as Arizona and New Mexico was taken from the Mexicans and became part of...

We booked the Taos Valley RV park which Tom Tom found extremely hard to find. We gave up and looked it up on Google Maps. The RV park is very nice and the staff are helpful in giving you suggestions of what to see in the area. The first afternoon we just spent walking around the shops in the city centre.  The second day we went to the Taos Peublo – the oldest living Peublo in the country. We took the walking tour with one of the local students and learnt a little about everything around us. They don’t like to give away much about their culture as it has been used against them, so they don’t even write anything down and never will. Their traditional values are guarded as sacred. The town doesn’t use electricity or running water, lights are propane.   Some houses use wood stoves while others still use the fireplaces to cook. The adobe buildings are made from earth, straw and water, and sometimes stones or rocks. Bricks are made and baked in the sun to make them waterproof...