Albuquerque offers lots of opportunity to have fun and do interesting things. You might want to add a few extra days to your trip to visit some of them with friends, spend part of your family vacation, or make your youth handbell group's trip even more memorable. The city's latitude and altitude combine to give it a pleasant year-round climate. Its elevaton of approximately 5,000 feet spares it the extreme heat of Phoenix and other lower-altitude cities in the same latitude. The average daily range of temperature is relatively wide, but long peiods of extreme temperatures are rare. Albuquerque summers usually bring no more than 15 to 20 days when the temperature reaches 100F.

Here are a couple of web sites to check out for fun things to do before or after "Rising to New Heights" at the Area XI 2008 Festival Conference. There may not be time during the conference to take in much of any of these.