Photoshoot

Midway through the holiday Jules is flying into Albuquerque and we're all driving West to one of the locations from Breaking Bad since it's a nice accessible part of the desert.  It's only forty-five minutes from the hotel but it's not immediately clear how to get there with.  We'll need to get some lat/long co-ordinates.  It seems to be within an Indian Reservation.  Whether that makes access an issue I'm unsure.  Certainly last year were saw many signs saying we couldn't enter reservations - sometimes not at all because of prayer things going on - and sometimes without permits.  We'll have to investigate more.

Sunrise kicks in at 7:16am so we'll need to leave at 6am to get there at 6am to get there.

Ghost Towns

I THINK we'll only have two relatively long drives on this holiday (though time will tell).  After our first hotel we're driving from Springville down to Moab.  All being well it's about 185 miles and 3 hours.  The thing is there are four - FOUR - ghost towns to the South West of that first hotel.  Do we want to take what will probably be a two hour detour (plus exploring time)?

The towns are; Dividend, Eureka, Mammoth and Silver City.

There's a good list at this website.

Booking Hotels and Planning/Not Planning

It's most unlike us to book many hotels in advance but we've actually booked three hotels (well, two hotels and a house) for the first six nights.  A night in Springville, then onto Moab for three nights where we can drive out to see the ghost town at Cisco then onto stay in a house for a couple of nights in Monticello.  Then as we're meeting Jules for a photoshoot in Albuquerque we've booked a hotel near the airport for picking up duties. And finally, we've re-booked the hotel in Springville for the return flight at the end of the trip.

As with Route 66 last year we're trying to draw the line between planning so we don't get back home and realise we were ten minutes from something cool, but equally not letting serendipity taking care of things.