It’s over Anakin, I have the high ground.

Obi-Wan Kenobi:    It’s over Anakin, I have the high ground.
Anakin Skywalker: You underestimate my power!
Obi-Wan Kenobi:    Don’t try it.
        Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith

High ground seems to be a recurring theme for this week. Despite the fact that I’m getting a bloody nose on a regular basis, I’m enjoying the treks up and into these high places.

We started yesterday morning off, at Dad Windu’s request, with a trip to the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque. For such a nondiscript little hole in the wall, we all had quite a good time seeing about 30 different types of snakes – plus reptiles and spiders. I was a little leery about going in, not being a fan of snakes, but apparently a thin pane of glass is all it takes to reduce my “willy” factor. There was one particularly beautiful snake, an albino, showcased on black rock that followed Padawan Learner back and forth. It was… mesmerizing.

We tried to get PL some trampoline time at a local gym, but they had birthday parties scheduled for the entire afternoon and night so – No gym for you! He was definitely bummed, but we’ll look for another place in Las Cruces. At J. Kubenka’s suggestion, we roamed through the Aquarium and Botanical Gardens in town. They have some gigantic sting rays (my favorite) and a couple of nasty looking sharks (PL’s). Although the flowers in the garden were long past their prime, it was a really relaxing walk. Our friend, C-3PO, would have loved the Botanical Garden: it had several G-scale trains running through it.

And now we get into the high ground part: the Petroglyphs National Monument was hiking and climbing galore. The park has 3 different locations for viewing the petroglyphs and we went to them all. We even had an unexpected little “extra” journey after taking a wrong “path” on the last location. Doh! Oh well, PL certainly didn’t seem mind that he had to blaze a path down the side of a mountain. After that, we headed down to Socorro for the night. It was an all around pleasant day, and a perfect day for driving.

Today we headed out to the Very Large Array and it was beautiful in its simplicity. You can see it from miles away. The three arms are each 13 miles in length, in a Y formation. They even cross two roads. I thought we’d be there maybe 20 minutes, tops, but we were there for an hour or so instead – and PL and DW aren’t even astronomy geeks like me.

We had a beautiful drive through the  mountains to Silver City, NM, but we may have found PL’s mountain-driving limit. He started to get a little car-sick about 3 hours in, so I got to try out the backseat for the first time this trip. I know where I’ll be sitting when we finally head up to the cliff dwellings in Gila!