or the northern end of the Guadalupe Mountains that we visited around Christmas time.
Fast forward a quarter century and now our son and his wife are living in Santa Fe. Since he was graduating as a UNM Lobo with an MBA we figured springtime would be a fine time to revisit the Land of Enchantment. Now I get it. The northern part of the state is really special.
Hard to go wrong if you decide to stay in downtown Santa Fe. The view outside our room (and in every other balcony for miles) was decorated with red chiles
and the hotel was around the corner from the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi
Fun fact: that hard-to-see white statue to the left is Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first (and I'm guessing only) Algonquin–Mohawk canonised by the Roman Catholic Church. She only reached the age of 24 when she died in 1680.
Can you blame her? Five stars. It's a must see. We booked their Paleontology hiking tour and one of the O'Keeffe bus tours and they were both well worth the time and money.
There is a small museum there and it is quite a treasure if you're into dinosaur bones. Ghost Ranch is where over one hundred well-preserved specimens were found of the official state fossil, the small early raptor Coelophysis.
They are still discovering specimens in one of the newer Ghost Ranch quarries. The best example is Tawa hallae, a man-sized theropod, shown below, drawn with Charcoal at the site where it was recently excavated.
The best part of the O'Keeffe tour was when the bus would stop at one of the points-of-interest that inspired the artist to paint some of her later works.
It did rain on us during both tours, but it's impossible to mind when (a) the locals are giddy that they're getting any precipitation at all and (b) your shirt dries almost instantly after the cloud passes and the New Mexico sun resumes beating on you. At the beginning of this year we spent a week in Amsterdam and felt nary a rain drop. During our 5 days in the 47th State it rained and/or snowed every day. Go figure. During the one day the snow canceled our plans to go to the mountains we instead explored an old bowling alley kindly purchased by George R R Martin and transformed by Santa Fe artists into Meow Wolf. Wow! Interactive Art meets The Twilight Zone. We all enjoyed it.
At this point we will remind you of the main reason for our trip: our son's graduation. The University of New Mexico is quite the beautiful campus and it even has a decent duck pond.
Back to downtown Santa Fe. Strolling out of our hotel they are having a festival. Like they do every weekend. Take in some Low Rider culture:
Look for cheap (as well as super-costly) turquoise jewelry. Go to a street vendor and order a tremendous $5 Fajita (or even deadlier to the arteries, a Chicharrón Burrito). When they ask if you want red or green chiles make sure to answer "Christmas" for both! Check out the San Miguel Mission, oldest church in the country, built around 1610.
Walk into one of the many portals around downtown and find historical plaques, such as the one commemorating the secret "shuttling of scientists" to Los Alamos.
Visit the Loretto Chapel, where the sisters had their prayers answered and an architecture marvel was mysteriously created: a spiral staircase was added, by one person, after the chapel had been completed. It's quite the story, so much so that a movie was made about it. Fellow tourists said it's a decent movie and IMDB agrees that you should see The Staircase (1998).
There's also dozens of art galleries to see around Santa Fe, from the very expensive to the obscenely expensive.
We end this post with our last day visiting New Mexico, when our daughter-in-law and the rest of the Santa Fe Concert Band gave a free Mother's Day concert two blocks from our hotel. Here she is on flute as the band plays Weather Report's classic "Birdland":
Land of Enchantment, indeed. We look forward to a return trip so we can go hike their mountains .
