RECAP: I sold my 97 Toyota T100 pickup on eBay to a buyer in Albuquerque and towed my R1100RT up there so I could ride it back. I rented a one-way trailer for the bike and originally planned to just ride it back myself. Instead my wife Teresa and I ended up riding at least 1400 miles, up to Taos, NM, around the "Enchanted Circle", back down to Albuquerque via scenic roads, out to Gallop, back into Juarez with stops at volcanoes and Indian pueblos all along the way. Then back thru El Paso to SATX during the hottest part of the day. I failed to note the start mileage, but 1400 is about right and we were gone for 9 days. We never had any problems with any of the hotels we stayed at and there were bikers everywhere in New Mexico. Much more so than in San Antonio area. We did meet 3 Texas bikers, two from llano and one from Houston. We took a bunch of photos and I stuck only the best ones here.  I organized them about the cities we visited.

Almost at the last minute my wife Terri wanted to go and we decided to make a vacation out of it instead of me just riding back. She had never been more than 160 miles on the back of my BMW (Coopers BBQ in llano) but she was willing to try the 820 mile return even though it was thru the hottest part of Texas.

We had never been to Albuquerque but my great.great.great.?..grandfather had build a house in 1790 in Albuquerque and it had been converted to a bed and breakfast so we reserved a room there for two nights. We left at 5am from SATX and arrived about 14 uneventful hours later Sunday May 23rd. The next morning we turned the trailer in to U-HALL and the Toyota pickup to the buyer and then we started looking at where we were going to go on the bike.

The Albuquerque area we rode out to the longest cable car/gondola trip in the world (supposedly). A trip up to the top of Sandia peak. There was motorcycle parking at this location and I saw more "motorcycle only" parking areas in New Mexico than I ever saw in Texas. Pic 8603 (on the left here)  you can see my BMW and when we returned, that parking area had filled up with motorcycles, mostly HD. Pic 8610 (on the right) is the peak, about 10,300 feet. Unaccountably, there were moths everywhere, in all the buildings & restaurants and somebody make a joke that they reason the curio shop did not sell Navaho rugs was the moths would eat them up. At just about every underpass, the sides were painted with adobe type colors instead of plain concrete. Many were frescoed. We saw very few sports bikes, almost all HD or HD look-alikes throughout NM. Rarely a BMW or Gold Wing. I have been back for two days now, but have not yet got my backpack an other stuff we mailed from El Paso and the notes my wife and I wrote are in the back pack. I am going to wait till that comes in before writing any more trip reports or identifying what all happened in those photos. Many my wife took from the back seat and almost fell off on once occasion when I had to make a sharp turn while she was taking a picture.

I plan on posting more info about the trip and have some interesting stories. The NM Vietnam Veterans monument was really worth seeing, AFAICT Texas has nothing like this.  and we talked to two llano bikers there who had gone back a 2nd time to take pictures. I will post more about all this later along with some stories about what we saw and did. We would not have known about that monument except for a 3rd biker from Houston who told us not to miss it. More about this later.

We got back into San Antonio  late Tuesday, after driving from El Paso to Sonora during the hottest part of the day this Monday (veterans day).