La Fiesta: Santa Fe, NM

Having felt the heat of the Texas sun, and having enjoyed the splendor and ease of the Omni's in both Houston and Austin, we three travelers decided to bypass the single night of camping Palo Duro State Park (a little south of Amarillo) and take a more direct route to the Santa Fe, stopping for a brief sleep in Clovis, (a little west of Muleshoe...) New Mexico.
We rose fairly early for the jaunty trip through somewhat pretty scrubland north, making good time on a desert-windswept two-lane passing small hamlets and Native pueblos (edified with more double-wides than adobe).

"Whoever designed Santa Fe must have been drunk, and riding backwards on a mule." Will Rogers' poke at the circutous, similarly-named alleys and round-about strips called streets came to mind as we wound our way off the highway and into downtown Santa Fe. A brief check-in with the Hotel Santa Fe (majority owned by a local tribe who know style and panache), and then we worked our way to the High Road to Taos, a scenic route north that leads ultimately to Taos Pueblo, with smaller, familial pueblos along the way, like the village of Chimayo.











Chimayo is centered around the Santuario de Chimayo, famed for the healing El Posito (holy hole of sand) in the chapel's oldest wing. Built in the early 1800's as a Spanish Catholic church for the local farmers and converted natives, the sanctuary now acts as the end point for the most walked pilgrimage in the United States. Tens of thousands of believers walk to the church, many seeming to leave their crutches and oxygen tubes behind, cured by the sands of Chimayo.







We met Em's Uncle Chris and Aunt Caralee (camping in the Southwest for several weeks and serendipitously in the Santa Fe area the same time as us) in Chimayo, where they were staying that night. We decided to meet up at the plaza de Santa Fe the next day for lunch, art museums and the native vendors who line along the sidewalk.









We enjoyed the day's festivities, as well as a jaunt to the Institute of American Indian Art, as a modern, cponceptual art gallery called SITE Santa Fe, about as different as two art galleries can be.



The four of us (Moose kindly waited in the hotel room with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry on the HBO to keep him happy) dined in one of Santa Fe's oldest restaurants, El Farol. in an old adobe home. One can tell the authenticity of an adobe dwelling by the sheer thickness of the mud walls; the doorways at El Farol were framed by smoothed plaster over bricks at least 10 inches thick. Tapas, concieved and flavored with the mixed heritage of traditional Spain and New Mexico, with sangria and a sugared fig dessert, was the perfect finishing meal to our brief foray into the Southwest.

We awoke early the next day for our long-ish drive to the Grand Canyon.