Will you be visiting Chaco while you're staying in Farmington? If you haven't been there before, I'd put it even higher on my list than Bisti. The Bisti Badlands are pretty cool, but there's so much competition for more amazing spots in NM.
How much have you "been there, done that" in NM? If you're open to something "different" we had an amazing time down south just above the panhandle. We stayed at a place called
Rusty's RV Ranch and used that as our base to cross over the hills into AZ to visit Chiricahua National Monument. It was one of our most memorable days ever. Chiricahua is very much like Bryce, UT.
We got some nutty advice from the nice woman who runs Rusty's. She gave me a Xerox of a hand-drawn map and sent us over the hill. As you can see by the toys in my sig, I'm no stranger to off-road driving, but this was pretty intense in our long bed dually. It was a dirt fire road that still had plenty of snow on it. There were no turnouts and we were committed, so we kept going.
The smarter/safer way was to head north to I-10 to loop around the range. But it was one of those days that made for incredible memories.
Or if you're trying to stay up north, we loved it up in Angel Fire, northeast from Santa Fe.
If you'd rather stay closer to the city, Albuquerque makes a pretty good base to explore Santa Fe and Taos. Make sure to take the mountain loop to the east of town and drive up through Madrid (MAD-rid and not muh-DRID).
You can practically throw a dart at the map of New Mexico and find amazing things. Even our trip to Bisti was a fun and memorable day.
