Peggy and I normally choose to prepare food and eat in our Barbarian Invader because eating out regularly results in one or both of us getting the shits. However, for no clearly identifiable reason, we elected to try a restaurant for breakfast with the strange name of Murphy’s Mule Barn today and we started out by putting the address coordinates into the Garmin. The Garmin calculated the best or worst route or shortest duration or shortest distance to the breakfast joint and finally arrived at a solution. The place was about 25 miles away but we were committed and we departed Hidden Valley RV Mountain Resort and embarked on today’s explorations.
Murphy’s Mule Barn ended up being a fairly large masonry building with a nice truck stop-type clientele. We went into the place and cozied up to the front desk for a minute until a staff person came over to us and gave us a funny look. When we asked where she wanted us to sit, her eyebrows went up and she replied that we could sit wherever we wanted as long as it wasn’t on some other customer. I had checked out the Barn on the internet and found they served chicken fried steak. That was no idle boast because when they brought my steak, it covered the entire plate such that the rest of the food that comes with it had to be plopped down on another plate. It was definitely large – maybe a square foot.
Peggy went for enchiladas in verde sauce which in New Mexico means green chiles, not tomatillos. She stated that they were very tasty and they must have been because I didn’t even get a bite. I was busy devouring my amply-sized steak and eggs and hash browns and they were all very tasty although the steak could have stood one or more additional passes through the meat tenderizer. I congratulate them on the prodigious portions but they are not in a class with Jake’s in Bend, OR, or Dean’s in Clackamas, OR, where the chicken fried steak, despite it’s mundane origins, is truly joyous in texture and taste. The bill, all in, was less than $20 and we waddled away fat and happy.
We departed the Mule Barn and went looking for a spot to view the upcoming Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta which is scheduled to start this Saturday, October 3. The Balloon Fiesta grounds are located on the east side of the Rio Grande River (which is really not very grande here) and so we scoped out the west side of the river and found some likely candidates for watching the Fiesta without being obliged to commune with the millions of tourists and balloon fans who come to watch whatever it is they watch.
From the west side of the Rio Poquito, we headed for Petroglyphs National Park which was only about 4 miles away. We stopped in at the visitor center, obtained some maps and a T-shirt and then drove off to a section of the park called Boca Negra Canyon. There are some short trails here where folks like us can see the petroglyphs, or carvings on rocks, without having to take extended treks. The short trails were just right because it was about 90 degrees today and the ancient rock carvers had not had enough foresight to build shade structures for contemporary tourists to use. The petroglyphs you can see are pretty neat and we took a lot more time than the brochure indicated we should while looking at the ancient runes and pix.
After Boca Negra Canyon, we drove around to the west side of the park to see some extinct volcanos which were quite extinct volcano-like. From here we went to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. It is located in a very modern building that is so modern that finding the door to access the place is more difficult than we expected. We ultimately found our way in, parted with $6 a head and took off for a tour of the museum.
This museum is very nice with exhibits about coal, planet creation, volcanism, lots of dinosaur skeletons, a section covering computers and communications, brilliantly colorful salt water tropical fish in tanks, minerals and gems and a thing called an “Evolator Time Machine” which we missed for fear of emerging looking like Arnold Schwartzenegger. This was really a pretty good natural history museum and worth the $6.
We stopped by a Trader Joe’s on the way home and bought more food to augment our already ample stocks of stuff that is probably not good for us but tasty. Only $100 went to this worthy cause but it will probably prevent us from taking another trip to the Mule Barn.