Albuquerque: Old Town
Once you've cruised up and down Central Avenue , looking at the flashing neon and 1940s architecture of this twenty-mile stretch of Route 66 (Sun Tran buses do it all day for 75¢), most of what's interesting about Albuquerque is concentrated in Old Town , the recently tidied-up old Spanish heart of the city. As the billboards on the interstate nearby rightly proclaim, "it's darned old and historic." The tree-filled main plaza is overlooked by the twin-towered adobe facade of San Felipe de Neri church , and circled by horse-drawn carriages that you can hop on for a short tour ($5). It's a very pleasant place to wander or have a meal, even if there's not a whole lot otherwise to do. One of the more bizarre of the many knickknack shops is the Rattlesnake Museum southeast of the plaza at 202 San Felipe St NW (daily 10am-6pm; $2), which has live rattlers on display. Nearby, Gus's Trading Post, at 2026 Central Ave NW, is one of the best-value shops in the Southwest for buying the perfect bolo tie or other pieces of Indian jewelry .Still on Central Avenue, in the Old Town Shopping Center half a block west of the plaza, the intriguing little Turquoise Museum (Mon-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm; $2) may look like just another mall store, but turns out to be more of a fortified bank vault, filled with rare and beautiful turquoise nuggets. The New Mexico Museum of Natural History , four blocks northeast of the plaza at 1801 Mountain Rd NW (daily 9am-5pm; closed Mon in Jan & Sept; $5), has full-scale, animated models of dinosaurs, a simulated volcanic eruption and a replica of an Ice Age snow cave, as well as an engaging, touchable collection of fossils and dinosaur bones.
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