Travel home - New Mexico/Utah Trip - January 20-21, 2026

We had about nine hours of driving on this day and so we started fairly early after a buffet breakfast at the hotel.  We stayed at the Hampton Inn Albuquerque-Coors Road and had dinner at Mariscos Altamar.  This was the best Mexican food we had on the trip.  I really enjoyed my seafood ceviche.  

We enjoyed a leisure morning at the hotel the next day with breakfast and a few last conversations before we parted ways.  I had a 2:00 p.m. flight and we had to check out by 11:00 a.m. so we left a little after 10:00 a.m. with plans to visit Boca Negra Canyon which is part of the Petroglyph National Monument before they dropped me off at the Albuquerque airport.  (That's five national parks, a national wildlife refuge, and a national monument for me this trip!). This is a small park with three short trails to climb up lava rock and see some neat petroglyphs.

My parents then dropped me off at the airport around 11:30 a.m.  The Albuquerque airport is a nice small airport.  I walked up to the Delta area to check my bag and before I could even try and use the machines to print out my luggage tag, an agent waived me up where he took care of it for me.  I then took the escalators up to the terminal and walked right through security with no line at all.  Multiple agents were waiting.

Once through security, I checked out my gate and decided how I wanted to spend the next two hours.  There was a restaurant right in the middle of the B terminal called Burque Brews that had local beers and and a pretty amazing Guacamole Chicken Sandwich and the table I was given was a nice large booth with a huge window looking out at the planes.  I tried the Alien Amber from an Albuquerque brewery which was pretty good.

After enjoying a nice meal, I found my gate once again and snatched a counter seat looking out with plugins to wait.  My flight was on time and I had the entire row to myself with no one even behind or in front of me.  I treated myself to a sparkling brut wine and enjoyed the flight blogging.

My flight got in early so I had a little time to wait at the airport and charge my laptop before my Groome shuttle picked me up at 8:45 p.m.  There were four of us headed to Birmingham in a 12 passenger van so plenty of room to spread out and continue blogging.  We made it back to Birmingham about a half hour early, around 10:15 p.m. which was really nice as I still had about a mile walk to get home.

The trip was more than I expected.  I need to add Utah back to my list of trips to take again.