Day 34 (8/1) Santa Fe and driving to San Antonio. (Lin) Today was our longest driving day yet: 11 hours. Texas is yuuuge, yuge, I tell you. And New Mexico is not small, either.

We all had a hard time getting up this morning. Travel fatigue is definitely kicking in. Fortunately, there was nothing urgent. We finally got around to loading up and walking around downtown Santa Fe, where our hotel was located. That place is cute! Totally manufactured and carefully cultivated, of course, with the low-level mud-plaster adobe style construction everywhere. Basically, everything looks like centuries-old Spanish mission buildings. Still, super cute and touristy. We walked around the plaza, went to the old Governor’s Palace (now a history museum with an open craft market out front), and got—perhaps oddly, given that it is a place rich in Spanish history—delicious crepes and French bread at a local creperie.

We also walked a short distance to two churches. The first was the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, and I was fascinated to find a statue to Kateri Tekakwitha out front (who was a Mohawk from Montreal, died in the 17^th c., and was made a saint recently – the first such one in North America). The second church was San Miguel, which bills itself as the oldest church building in America (early 17^th c.). It was small, cute, and ornate in the inside.

We got on the road and steered our GPS to San Antonio. The original plan (in the spring, when we planned the trip) was to sleep in Dallas overnight, but so many of you suggested that we drive the extra distance to Austin or San Antonio. I’ve been to both cities, and I like San Antonio especially, so it didn’t take too much convincing to change our plans. I especially want to show the kids the Riverwalk and the Alamo.

Almost immediately after leaving behind the impressive and beautiful mountains outside of Albuquerque, the NM landscape turned pretty flat, and it stayed that way through south/central Texas. Although we had lovely blue skies for most of the day (along with some totally fun cloud formations and combinations), as we crossed into Texas we could see a huge storm cell ahead, and the wind picked up somewhat ferociously. We could even see a small dust storm on the horizon to the north. We kept an eye on the weather and radar, and ended up driving through what was really only a heavy and windy downpour. Still, for a half hour or so, we felt like we were in an episode of storm chasers, which excited the kids quite a bit.

There’s really no major highway from Santa Fe to San Antonio; 85% of our driving today was on secondary roads, but in this part of the country that means extremely straight and high quality roads that have 75 mph speed limits (except through the occasional town). We also drove through a 60 mile long wind farm, with windmills as far as you could see.

At dusk we hit the town of Eden, billed as the center of Texas. We had to stop and take a picture of our Eden in Eden!

We had an 11 hour driving day (with stops), but with the loss of one hour coming across the time zone, it meant we were in the van from 11:30 am – 11:30 pm. The kids handled it well overall. I think we all felt it was a nice change of pace after pushing so hard for the past week and a half.