The in-laws visit!

So this weekend Alison's parents came to Albuquerque from Phoenix to visit us. They arrived at lunchtime on Saturday and stayed until after lunch on Sunday. Lots of driving for little old us. We started out by going to the Plaza for lunch, eating at La Placita Restaurant, where we took my parents when they visited a couple weeks ago. I went with the Enchiladas Ranchera, which translates to three enchiladas of varying ingredients (ground beef, chicken, and cheese). It was OK, but not my favorite thing I've had there. The salsa was spicy today.
After that we went back to the house and decided to go visit the Sandia Peak Tramway, which we had never taken before. It is very expensive ($17.50 per person), but pretty neat. Most of the pictures below are of the tram ride.
Tram car at the base. You can see that the off-duty operators get to ride strapped to the top of the tram car. This is what we in the business call "bat-shit insane."

Picture out the west side of the tram. It was getting on toward late afternoon so the sun is in a bad spot for pictures. There were probably about 20 of us in the car, so we were far less cattle-car-packed-in than we had been in the Funicular in Switzerland.
Picture taken off the east side of the mountains. You're looking down one of the chair lift runs toward apparently a southern tip of the Santa Fe Mountains.
This is one of the chairs on that very chair lift. Alison said that she would never take this lift due to the extreme apparent age of the chairs. For safety there is a chain that you can put across your lap.
A picture of another chair on a different lift from below. We came to the conclusion that these chairs are not meant for discomfort, but rather that they are likely padded in the winter when they're running.
Please leave the flowers! There were very few flowers up here to leave. We did not take this path.
A picture of the Williams family (minus one) above the chair lift. Smiles all 'round.
Another photo down the chair lift run toward the east.
Now if you can't beat Ned to this point, you should really give up.
A photo of a hang glider up on top of the crest. There were about 4 of these up there and they had a big crowd gathered around them.
A photo toward the south from the tramcar on the way back down. This is looking down the west face of the Sandia Mountains. After we came down off the mountains, we drove over to the Chama River Brewing Company just off I-25. We have been here for lunch a couple times before, and it's excellent food. I had a burger and Alison had hummus and sweet potato fries. I also had a beer that I am pretty sure was different from the one I ordered, but it was still quite good. After that we went bowling, which was great fun. I bowled a 152 in my first game, which I'm pretty sure was my best game ever. It would have been even better had I not tossed two gutter balls after my initial strike in the tenth frame. The second game was not so good (115).
Alison bowling. The sweatshirt was quickly removed. After bowling we went home and had a little bit of the peach pie I had made on Friday. That was it for Saturday! On Sunday morning we got up and went over to take a walk on the Rio Grande, going from the parking area on Central down to Tingley Beach and back. After that we went out to eastern Albuquerque to eat lunch at the Olive Garden. This was our second visit there this week, but there's nothing wrong with that. Breadsticks have made a bit of a comeback there, although the ends are still kind of dry and hard. After lunch the in-laws headed out of town and we got back to normal life.

OK, the post was far more boring than the actual weekend. Also, this is my 100th post! But only on blogspot; apparently I have missed 5 posts on myspace...if you still only look at my Myspace blog, this is probably a good reason to switch.