My family has just returned from the execution of an extraordinarily inefficient summer vacation idea: hitting the "New" states: New Mexico, New Jersey and New York.

This is what happens when your wife's family arranges a reunion out west just before you visit your family on the East Coast.

In just a couple of weeks, we managed to raft a lazy four-mile stretch of the Rio Grande, get as close as we could to the Statue of Liberty (she doesn't let you get too intimate these days) and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to some of the best pizza in the Greatuh Noo Yawk Area. But the most memorable moment came one hot afternoon outside Taos, N.M.

My brother-in-law and I were taken into a squad car for illegal walking.

We'd just visited the Taos Pueblo. Its multistoried adobe buildings, with the largest peaks in New Mexico in the near distance, have been inhabited continuously for more than 1,000 years. There is still no electricity or running water within its walls. It's a wondrous place, with a stream running through the heart of the village. The dozen children of our extended family clambered everywhere while we chatted with members of the tribe, nearly all of whom now live in modern homes outside the walls but have this jaw-dropping summer getaway, a sacred trust that means more than any vacation cabin ever could.

They even serve funnel cakes. Oh, they call it fry bread and turn them out on a little camp stove, but when you smear on the honey and bite into the sweet pastry, your taste buds tell you you're back at the Three Rivers Arts Festival or your church carnival. Adding sweetener to a large lump of fried dough may be humankind's most ancient multicultural tradition.

When the heat started to wear us down we headed for the parking lot. Because our oversized group had been leaving with roughly the cohesion of confetti in a wind tunnel, we found ourselves with too many folks for one car. So my wife's older brother Mike, a Wisconsin expatriate who is now an Australian, and I volunteered to walk the two miles back to our rented house.

We were ambling along a quiet road, discussing loons of our acquaintance on our respective continents, and picking up aluminum cans to toss in the recycling bin when we got back. We were less than halfway home when we both had healthy handfuls of flattened metal. That's when the police car pulled up.

"You can't walk along this road,'' the officer told us. He then told us he'd take us down the road as far as the casino, but he didn't want the cans in the car.

"Leave them on the road,'' he said.

It may have been one of history's first instances of mandatory littering, but we weren't about to argue with a lawman offering a free ride. He dropped us a half-mile down the road, as promised, and we weren't too long in the sun before another car, driven by yet another of my wife's brothers, picked us up. All the seats were taken, so Mike and I sat in the cargo area of the wagon, like the '60s kids we were, and made our way happily but illegally home, sans seat belts.

Later, I called the Taos Pueblo Tourism Department to find out why this sovereign nation that believes in "preserving our ancient traditions in the face of advancement of modernization'' won't let anyone walk a road that locals have walked since Middle Ages.

Liability was the short answer. Ever since an accident on the road some years back, the tribe worries about getting sued. Tourists are invited to take the "Chili Line'' from town to the ancient site.

I once made fun of Cranberry for signs along Route 19 that warn it's illegal to cross the road in any direction at any time, but it's clear America's campaign against walking is widespread. Even in New Mexico, where gasoline prices are higher than anywhere but Hawaii, and in a place where ancient ways are revered, the most natural form of transportation on Earth is illegal.

So when my wife told me a week later we should walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, I agreed. That's one long stroll but, someday, our daughters may have to explain to their kids what walking was.