We stayed in Cortez, CO for four nights at our first Boondockers Welcome site. It was a great experience with hosts (Mack and Kay McInnes) that went above and beyond to make us feel welcome! When we mentioned to Kay that we were heading to Albuquerque for the Balloon Fiesta, she said they were too! They used to live in Albuquerque and were on a chase crew for Morning Manna, piloted by Bob Kross. We told her we were interested in chasing, so she asked if there was room for us on their team and they said yes. Woohoo! (I’ll say more about this in the Albuquerque post.) There were two other couples also staying there part of the time and at one point we were all hanging out in their yard sharing stories. Loved it!
Cortez had a pretty cool area called Hawkins Preserve that we spent a couple of hours hiking around. Great scenery, especially given how close it was to town. We also enjoyed the church service at Rock Springs Church, which the McInnes invited us to attend, then lunch at the Loungin’ Lizard.
We spent one day at Mesa Verde National Park, which was only about 15 minutes away from Cortez. BUT, it took about an hour to drive through the park to get to the Long House, where we did a park ranger tour and were able to walk around the ruins while the ranger told us about them. When we went to Mesa Verde with the kids, we toured the Balcony House. Long House was very similar yet still interesting. And the scenery while driving around was awesome, so we stopped a good bit at overlooks to take pics.
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