Day 2 - Red River, New Mexico

Day Two 6/26

Today we just get to relax and go hiking in beautiful Red River.

I got up and made pancakes for everyone, and then we played the board game Risk as a family.


Rachel was bored and decided to make up our pack lunches.


We took the lunches to The Palisades, a beautiful rock formation, and then we went on a hike. Part way through the hike it started to rain, a cold rain with big fat raindrops, and I made a bee-line for a rock that had a little cover. We snuggled there as a whole family when the rain turned into sleet. Maeve said, “God provided us cover just when we needed it. Sure enough I didn’t see another rock outcropping like that the rest of our hike. The rain only lasted a few minutes, so we soon resumed our hike in a forest that smelled wet and clean. I realized that this city girl had never smelled the smell of pine that wasn’t in a candle or on a cutout cardboard tree meant to hang in a car. It was heavenly.


I had a very hard moment that night when I stepped out of the cabin and finally understood what forty degrees felt like, and realized that I had not packed the kids warm enough jackets for camping the next night. It's June, right? That means summertime. Jeffrey was upset too because that meant a delay the next day going to the biggest town in the area, Taos, which isn't that big, and the added expense. I got in a big funk, so to cheer me up Jeffrey made me come outside and look at the stars. I hadn't seen so many stars since I was 17 in Papua New Guinea, and those were Southern Hemisphere stars. We could even see the hazy band of the Milky Way. I think I was most impressed by the fact that we could actually see the stars twinkling, and it made me think that although every child knows the song "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", not that many of them have seen them. I had a brief temptation to wake the kids, but knowing we were getting up in 6 hours killed that impulse quickly.