Our day in Santa Fe

We took a break from endless driving to spend a full day in Santa Fe today. The city is beautiful -- completely built in the old Spanish colonial/adobe style. In fact, everything looks this way -- from the smallest hovels to the plethora of government buildings to every single hotel (chain or otherwise). Here's a good example - one of the bigger hotels.

There is a lot of history in Santa Fe -- witness the mural detailing the tale of the old Santa Fe Trail at our hotel above D's head -- but even more than history, Santa Fe is rich in... galleries. Seemingly endless rows of art galleries selling a mixture of artwork, quasi-artifacts, and tourist tsochkes trading on the region's mix of Spanish, Indian, and frontier history. If I need to buy, say, socks, I'd be out of luck here, but if I needed a portrait/icon of the Virgin Mary rendered in Spanish colonial style c. 1790 I would have a wealth of options.

We made a few planned stops today and did a lot of walking -- in excess of 15,000 steps. We started our day at the SITE gallery, where we saw a series of installations by an Icelandic artist (a resident of Santa Fe since 1980) known as Steina. The installations were all fairly interesting, but the clingy docent and our empty stomachs didn't combine well. I was more fascinated with the gallery being built right next door by a company called "Sarcon", which sounds like the name of a corporation run by a madman in a superhero movie who is secretly bent on world domination and is using his company to, say, build missile launchers under the guise of constructing boxy art galleries.

After SITE we made our way to downtown Sante Fe for breakfast at Cafe Pasqual's, which was crowded for good reason. We then made our way (by car) up to Museum Hill, overlooking some beautiful private homes in the surrounding hills. While there, we visited the Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art.

Afterwards, we spent hours wandering around downtown Santa Fe, which in addition to its many adobe buildings, also has the street layout (and street width) of an Old World Spanish town. Streets are often just wider than a single lane, and sometimes switch freely from one-way to two-way and back again within a few blocks. We saw the San Miguel Mission Church, which dates from 1610 and is the oldest extant church in the US. Pretty amazing.

We also saw the Loretto Chapel, which boasts a spiral staircase which apparently should not be able to exist from an engineering perspective, but does ("as seen on Unsolved Mysteries!", a sign outside boasts). We paid $2.50 per person to see this staircase. If you go to Santa Fe, do not spend money on this. I took one look at it and knew my engineer father could debunk this in minutes; as it turns out, the good people at Snopes have already done it for him.

Finally, we made our way to a small bookstore across town; along the way, we visited with a few dour but interesting wooden figures in a small park by the river. I don't know why D looks so down in this photo...




She cheered up once I entered the shot.






On to Dallas by way of Lubbock and the Buddy Holly Museum tomorrow -- 11 hours of driving!