Our first trip after Y2K didn’t end civilization as we know it was to San Antonio and then Santa Fe, by way of some other places in New Mexico, in April 2000. Those other places included Albuquerque, Madrid, NM and Bandelier National Monument and Los Alamos.

Here’s a roadside view of the Rio Grande as it runs through New Mexico. It isn’t an international border at this point, but is an unusual land form nevertheless.

I didn’t realize until much more recently that I was looking down at a rift. Or that, to quote the various scientists who put together this page about the rift, “most rifts are found along mid-ocean ridges. Only a few are located on land, such as the Rio Grande Rift, East African Rift (sometimes referred to as the Great Rift) and Lake Baikal, a lake-filled rift in Russia.”

I’m not exactly sure where the overlook was, but my guess would be along New Mexico 4 just outside of the national monument, and looking over the river into another section of the monument. Note the haze in the distance. That’s probably one of the controlled burns occurring when we visited. Soon, as in the very next month, a controlled burn became uncontrolled.

This is New Mexico 4, probably looking the other way from the outlook.

This is Lilly. A lot of the pictures I took on that trip involved her. Call it the first-child photography syndrome, though she was two and a half by this time.

She’s at breakfast in the place we stayed in Santa Fe. The reason we documented that particular moment (I think) was that we weren’t entirely sure she’d behave during breakfast — that is, stay seated and eat her food without much fuss. But she did. I guess she was just then learning to appreciate the joys of breakfasts on the road.