Thursday, October 09, 2008

I've been away in Santa Fe

Despite living in Denver for almost 40 years, we've never yet been to Santa Fe. So we decided that would be a good place to spend my birthday.

We drove down there on Sunday and returned today. I hope to have pictures later, unless there aren't any good ones.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Welcome back! Great to meet you and Leonore at last!

Travis Erwin said...

I prefer Taos but Santa Fe is fun as well.

TGirsch said...

My wife and I loved the Santa Fe area. A lot of the National Historic Sites in the area were very interesting and beautiful at the same time. And the food. Oh, the food...

We were lucky enough to go through Taos when they had the "Fire Rumsfeld" banner across the main street -- Rummy lived in Taos at the time. :)

David said...

Mitch!

It was great to meet you guys, too. What a fortunate coincidence that was. BTW, we went back to Tomasita's for my birthday dinner. Very enjoyable.

David said...

travis:

We never did get to Taos on this trip. We had intended to, but we used up the time with other stuff. Next time, probably.

David said...

tgirsch:

We spent three full days there. The first and third were for standard tourist stuff inside Santa Fe, including much food -- and including great Chinese food at a beautiful restaurant across the street from our motel. As everyone knows, tourists come to Santa Fe from all over to eat Chinese food. Or they should, in the case of that restaurant.

The second day we spent driving outside town -- the San Ildefonso Peublo (black pottery), Bandelier Monument (cave dwellings), White Rock overlook (spectacular view of the Rio Grande running through a junior version of the Grand Canyon), and scenery. We skipped Los Alamos; Leonore has a strong emotional aversion to it.

TGirsch said...

I could have given you wonderful recommendations had I known in advance you were going. Bandelier is incredible, and so is Pecos, if you didn't make that one. (Petroglyph, on the other hand, wasn't all that impressive.)

If you didn't get a green chile burger while you were there, you don't know what you're missing. I especially recommend the Bobcat Bite, a little roadside diner off old Route 66.

David said...

Unfortunately, I'm semi-allergic to green chile. I love the taste, but it does unpleasant things to me. Which obviously is a problem when you're visiting Santa Fe.

The red chile in Santa Fe was hotter than it tends to be in Denver. That surprised me.

Bandolier was a wonderful experience. I thought the valley was idyllic; it saddened me to think of a people having to leave it. We didn't get to Pecos.

We plan to spend more time driving around outside town on our next visit. Inside town, we didn't get to Museum Hill, and we only did part of Canyon Road. We had gallery burnout by the time we got there.