| Thursday, September 09, 2004: We spent the morning getting our monies worth at the spas of Oja Caliente and RVed to Taos, New Mexico. Our destination was Columbine National Forest Campground in Carson National Forest on SR 38, just a few miles east of Questa and we hoped away from civilization. We stopped in Questa to fill up the RV with gas and grabbed some home-made burritos at the family owned gas station and deli. We couldn’t understand the cook very well, so we just told her we wanted something “bueno” and didn’t mind if it was “caliente”. We came away with two wonderful tasting burritos, but we still are not sure what was in them. We lucked out finding a beautiful campground in the canyon along Columbine Creek. Many of the other Forest Service campgrounds were closed and some were deserted. Others didn’t look quite as nice. The private RV resorts didn’t exactly look invited either.
Today we decided to take the FZ1 on a two-up ride around the Taos Mountains. From the campground we headed east on SR 38 passing through the ski resort town of Red River and then took the dead end SR 578 to Wheeler Peak Village where we found one of the nicer communities in the mountains.
Backtracking to SR 38 we continued eastward passing thru Elizabethtown not bothering to stop at the Elizabethtown Museum which looked like a garage next to a single-wide. We continued to the intersection of US 64 at Eagles Nest. This town was in a huge grazing valley with a lake surrounded by mountains and RV parks. Looks like they got plenty of snow as we saw a number of snowmobiles.
We then followed 64 west towards Agua Fria, praying for some good twisties. We found them in the next 21 miles of US 64 on the way to Taos. Not exactly the Dragon, but some good lefts and rights and minimal traffic. It was a real surprise and a welcomed change to the normal high speed sweepers we had encountered all day. Stopping in Taos we parked on the Town square. We did the usual tourist thing looking through the shops and buying pins and T-shirts. It looked like an active small town square as several bands were setting-up to play for the night.
Leaving Taos we continued on US 64 west. By the way, the roads are not very well marked in this area. We decided to take a quick ride out SR 150 to Taos Ski Valley. We found it between seasons and not many people around other than construction workers preparing for the winter season. The road had nice twisties as it climbed into the mountain canyon. We backtracked and took a shortcut from Valdez to Arroyo Hondo. We then caught SR 522 to Questa and SR 38 back to the camp.
This was about a 4 hour trip including stops and did have some interesting sections.
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