Pecos National Historical Park

Never one to pass up a chance to insert a little history into our vacations, we spent a few hours at the Pecos National Historical Park.

Its about forty-five minutes outside of Santa Fe, so its perfect for your way in or out of Santa Fe.

When we arrived, this was our first "real" snow we had encountered on the trip, so the boys spent about half of our time at this park playing in the white stuff.

They couldn't believe it was really snow!

This boded well for our vacation, since we still weren't sure what would greet us when we got to Santa Fe. Despite the white capped mountains we could see in the distance, we were worried at all the colored ground we kept driving past.

But on to the national park... Pecos NHP is the home of the ruins of a very old pueblo, dating back 400+ years.

We don't see things that old in this part of the world that often.

The park has a museum and a movie to watch at the visitor's center. The boys were intrigued with the kivas from the movie, an underground room used for religious reasons. You can climb down into the kiva at Pecos NHP, so of course my kids were on this like white on rice.

Much of the original pueblo is in ruins now.

What remains of the church is simply stunning.

We were lucky enough to see it in winter with some snow on the ground, but I'd love to see it when its completely blanketed in white.

But it was nice to be able to see as much of the church as we could.

Like I said, the boys might have been a bit more interested in the snow than the church.

But isn't that part of what makes the national parks system so fabulous?

There's always something for everyone.

Oh, and the best part of visiting Pecos National Historical Park, according to Team Danger?

Civil War trading cards!!

Yep, that's right. The Battle of Glorietta Pass was fought here back in 1862, and there were five new cards to add to Team Danger's collection.

They also had a couple of different Junior Ranger program options at this national park. But in order to get the Civil War trading cards, we the boys had to answer some questions based on what they were learning in the museum, and that took us the better part of thirty minutes alone to answer. Plus... the snow was calling these Texas boys.