Taos, New Mexico... ROCK CLIMBING!

On my drive to Taos, I ran into a plethora of billboards on Indian City.  I stopped to see what all the ruckus was about.... turns out this is what I saw, which I thought was pretty funny.

Thursday night, Rory made me an amazing dinner and we chatted for a few hours.  The next day he had to go to work.  I had a lazy day: had lunch with Rory, sat at Cafe Mondo Kultur for 4 hours photoshopping a photo of Vernal Falls and met Rory at the office for a beer.  We then when to the Ski Valley for dinner and had a drink at a local bar.  Then decided it would be cheaper and more comfortable to buy a bottle and drink at home while watching TV on the couch.

This is Rory's place upstairs

Saturday we got up late and ran out of the house with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich only to drive to over an hour to El Rito.  We climbed from noon til 7:30.  I loved every minute of it, except when my hands got ripped up, but it was well worth it!  I found out that I really like rock climbing and I'm pretty good at it too.

Here I am getting ready for my first 5-7 climb of the day. 

(5 is a level of incline, vertical, 7 is the level of difficulty)

I'm almost at the top of my first climb here

We moved over on the wall and climbed up again, so this is the second one.

Getting ready for the First 5-9 climb

This is the start of the climb, this climb is over twice as high up as the first wall.

This was a really hard part on the wall, I realized that I was shredding my hands as I was grabbing the rocks and I was determined to make it up.

This is the last hard part of that wall

I made it to the top, and I'm proud of it.

I don't know if you can tell, but my hands are all ripped up.

I was exhausted by the time I was done with that wall.  My legs and arms were shaking.  I decided to not do the next wall, so that I would have the strength to do that last wall of the day.  The last wall was a 5-9 also and it didn't look too bad.  I ended up getting up there in a hurry cause I knew by now that staying in one place takes a lot of strength.

This was the scariest part of the day.

Saturday night we went home and ate the left overs from Thursday night's dinner and I needed a shower.  Ben, a friend from school, and his high school friend, Travis, came over to hangout.  After they left we watched a movie and went to sleep. 

Sunday we had an amazing breakfast.  We met Travis and some others at the Ski Valley, took the chair lift to the almost top, hiked up to the top and tried not to fall while walking down the backside.  By the time we got to the almost bottom, the Bavarian restaurant, I had blisters.  We were there for a long time and then walked all the way back to the car on a flat trail.  Except we went to Rory's new friend Eric's house.  It was pretty awesome.  He can ski right to his house.  Eric gave me the best souvenir of the trip so far, a vintage Duck shirt! I have no clue where he got it but he thought I would appreciate it more, I think he is right!  Now it is 8:00pm and Rory and I are starving, we went to this mexican joint, got some food to go and chowed down at home.  We went to sleep exhausted. 

Rory and I hiking a mountain!

I woke up in the morning said by to Rory as he went off to work and I went o Cafe Mondo Kultur again.  I got coffee and an awesome breakfast sandwich.  Took off for the longest drive yet 11 hours to Dallas.