Gallup, New Mexico

We began heading West, towards Northern Arizona, in the beginning of September. We wanted to get to the Flagstaff area before it got too cold. But the thought of slowing down in Gallup was too overpowering. We'd been told that Gallup is the real center of the universe for the American Indian culture...not Santa Fe, Albuquerque, or even the lands near the Four Corners Region. Gallup, as we found out for ourselves, is the place where many of the Indian artists and craftspeople take their finished goods to sell to the trade. The trade, as it turns out, are the many trading posts you see in the area. Some of these places date back to the 1800's and represent the trust set up between the white settlers and the native people. The white traders are the banking system for the Indians. They sell, or sometimes even pawn, their goods to these trading post people and wait for their money from the government or any other income to replentish them. The system has been operating like this since the first white people came from the east and continues to this day. Walking into some of the trading posts is an experience that may beg more questions than answers at first. Like "where do all these old saddles come from?" Some places have hundreds of them..all lined up inside the store. Answer? The Indians pawn them every time they need extra money, and then when it comes in, they come back for the saddle! Fascinating! More fascinating is the trust built up over the years between the traders and the Indians. A whole, separate financial system exists out here. Prices for good Indian jewelry and other goods is far lower here than in Santa Fe, Scottsdale, or other fashionable places to buy it. We took a side trip to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced "DESHAY") and the Hubbell Trading Post, fairly close by, and had a tour of the area.John Hubbell was a postal employee in Albuquerque and was bored with city life. The story goes, he got on a horse, rode until he reached this remote place, settled down here and bought the newly established post in 1878. He gained the Navajo's trust and the post continued operating within the same family until 1965, when it was sold to the US government, still operating and, today, is a living museum. Many now famous Indian artists traded their creations for staples and Hubbell began to amass an amazing collection, some of which is still displayed here. The trading post looks about the same as it did a hundred years ago. you can still buy many of the same goods here as then. Although we wouldn't consider Gallup a major vacation destination, it served our purpose well, to explore the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi areas...and afford a place for Mary Ann to add another piece of silver inlay jewelry (a beautiful ring) to her collection!

Albuquerque

• Albuquerque ( I finally learned how to spell it without looking it up, while staying here!) is a town of many hidden charms. A lot of people we know dismiss it, and when compared with much smaller neighbor Santa Fe, they ask "why bother, there's not much to do there." Hidden charms! Sometimes you have to dig down a little, and in this case it's well worth it. Downtown is very active by day and night. Areas like the Old Town, the original settlement, which dates back hundreds of years, is filled with cool shops, galleries, eateries, and walking venues. The Central Avenue area is lined with theaters, more stores, and more interesting places to eat. A couple we have sampled are The Artichoke Cafe http://artichokecafe.com/ where they do a sort of Italian leaning menu, with some really unusual choices. Much more casual, and only open during the day is The Grove http://www.thegrovecafemarket.com/ where everything is fresh, local,and very delicious. The place has a very West Coast feel. Just look at their website...and you will get hungry! Oh, and I almost forgot their english muffins. So what..english muffins? These are the english muffins to measure all others by..forever. First, they weigh about a pound each. Second, they have the most amazing flavor. They're soft and fluffy and chewy...and ggghhhhh... hard to just write about. They're needing to be experienced...in your mouth. See the picture up there. It doesn't do them justice. Enough said. These places are on Central, which is Route 66, and, as mentioned, in the historic East Downtown area. Further east, on the other side of I-25, still on Central, you'll find a lot of old original Route 66 motels and diners. This is also the area where the main campus of The University of New Mexico is located, so it can have a little bit of a funky feel in spots too. Not a bad thing, for here is where The Frontier http://www.frontierrestaurant.com/ is located. A sprawling old building houses one of Albuquerque's true dining treasures. Funky? You betcha! Walk up to one of the many order stations and tell them you want a burger, enchiladas, breakfast all day...whatever, then wait 'till they call your number. Go pick up your tray, and wow!!! You're back in school again! The place is all ambiance. The food is ok, not fine dining by any stretch, but lots of fun for just being there. It kind of reminds us of a smaller version of The Varsity in Atlanta. For some serious food, keep going east on Central until you get to Zinc Wine Bar http://www.zincabq.com/ .We've been going here for years, and it never fails us. Kevin Roessler, the managing partner, welcomes us whenever we pop in and always makes us feel at home. They have a great open kitchen, use really fresh ingredients, and the chef, Chris Pope, is usually around supervising the crew. We normally sit at their food bar so we can watch the preparation. Amazing still, how just a few people, well organized, can produce so many beautiful plates of food...all at one time! Last time there, one of the specials was Wild Halibut with heirloom rice, fava beans, sugar snap peas & braised baby red artichokes, cool sweet cherry tomato chutney. Delicious. In addition to these, there are nothing but surprisingly terrific restaurants all over town. After eating our way through the city, we spent a couple of days doing some large market shopping and personal maintenance ( M A had a day at the Aveda Salon), and we headed over to the Smart Car Dealership to outfit Smarty for the ride. Other than some normal maintenance for him too, he had his new bike hitch installed! A Smart Car with two bicycles riding on the back end! What a sight!! The next stop, after leaving the Big A....Gallup, New Mexico, and more kicks..on Route 66. Why would anyone spend a week in Gallup, New Mexico? Stay tuned right here.

The Next Chapter 2011

It would be safe ( and a BIG understatement!!) to say that a lot has happened since our last post! This past May, we made the decision to give up our cushy centrifugal force life in Dallas, and trade it in for, what to us, is a totally different and exciting adventure. We put all of our stuff that we felt we might want someday (5500 pounds left of downsizing!), outfitted Harvey for his new role as our permanent house on wheels, and set out for New Mexico...as full time motorhomers! Yes, what started out a few years ago as a great new way to travel, has turned out as a great new way to live. On May 15th we headed for Carlsbad so Mary Ann could take care of some family business, then on to Santa Fe, where we had a second home for eleven years until 2005. We picked it to start our adventure for several reasons: A) The cool summer weather with great mountain lightning storms at night, B) Our familiarity with every nook and cranny of the place, C) The way better than average availability of great (healthy) food, between the amazing organic farmers market, a myriad of good groceries ( Natural Grocers, Trader Joe's, TWO Whole Foods stores, and an better than average array of good restaurants which we'll touch on in a moment), and D) The easy availability of outdoor activities which we both have been sorely missing, living in Dallas. Don't get us wrong. We love Dallas and both feel it is one of the best huge cities in the U.S. to live in. We were just ready for a change.

So here we set up housekeeping in Santa Fe. One of our goals is to head to places we're interested in, and live there for at least a month so we can absorb what it's really like, not just skim the surface. We planted ourselves just south of town, at the Santa Fe Skies RV Park, owned by the Brown family. We picked the right place because we ended up stretching what was a month's stay...to three months! We spent almost the whole summer there. Not only was our hunch right about all the elements of Santa Fe, we got spoiled by the Brown's way of running an RV park. All park owners should go and visit them to see how one should be run. The property sits high on a hill, with mountain views in all directions. It's a small parcel of land on what is called Brown Castle Ranch, the family's real estate they have owned for many years. It's about a five minute drive to town, so it's very conveniently located.

It has been a few years since we spent a lot of time in Santa Fe, but it still feels very much like home to us. As with all tourist dependent towns, it has changed some too. There is a lot more traffic than we remembered and lots more stores. Cerrillos Road and St. Francis Drive, two of the main arteries into town can be almost gridlocked at certain times of the day, a situation that we didn't expect. The restaurant scene is still very active. Santa Fe is one of the few places we've visited that you can eat out and not feel like you've just had a dose of chemically treated, mass produced, institutional food. Many places feature local and even organic ingredients. Some of our favorites are Joe's http://joesdinerandpizza.com/ , Chocolate Maven (they deserve an entire posting for their pastries!) http://chocolatemaven.com/ , and Real Food Nation (and their sibling The Supper Club, a high end place where the chef was formerly with Cafe Escalera, a legendary Santa Fe eatery from days past) http://realfoodnation.biz/ . The Supper Club deserves special recognition too, because we find it often left off the trendy SF articles from so called authorities on food. They lately seem to have the same half dozen or so places in their must dine lists, in a town with a disproportionate number of amazing restaurants for it's size.

Well, after eating and hiking most of the trails, and Mary Ann taking hours of intensive Yoga training from her instructor, Tias Little, towards certification, and biking our way through our home away from home ( one day we even took The Rail Runner train into downtown with our bikes!), in the beginning of September we finally decided to head to new territory....

Canon City Colorado Part 1

We've spent a lot of time in Colorado these past few years, and we've visited lots of the popular destinations there. Last year, while we were in Breckenridge, we'd heard about an area of Southern Colorado that we weren't really very familiar with. Mary Ann had learned that a tiny town down there was an apple center. She knows what an apple nut I am. So we decided to head down to Penrose to check it out. We drove southeast, down from the high elevation of Breckenridge, all the way down to the five thousand foot level, and on the way to Penrose we entered the outskirts of Canon City. As we approached the center of town there was a full blown farmers market going on at the beautiful Veterans Park. We stopped and spent an hour or so, and then headed on to Penrose. After buying a small barn's worth of tiny, bittersweet Jonathans, we headed back uphill to Breck (as the locals call it)...but something interesting happened. Maybe it was the town's mayor, who walked up and introduced himself, explaining the much milder weather in the "banana belt" of Colorado, or maybe it was the other friendly folks at that farmers market, or the look of the tall, surrounding mountains, but we both felt we needed to come back and take a closer look at Canon City.
We drove up to Canon (as the locals call it) from Santa Fe, and came in from the west. Straight up US 285 to Alamosa, then starting to go northeast towards US Highway 50 and through the pretty town of Salida. From there we followed the Arkansas River for miles as it winds through beautiful canyons, then drops down and spills into Canyon City. As you approach this town of around 16,000 population, there is an almost European feel. Drive off of the US highway, and make a left one block, and suddenly you're on Main Street, right in the heart of the downtown area. Drive down Main, and there are bars and restaurants on both sides, a pharmacy, little shops of all kinds, galleries, the Skyline theater, with it's wonderful marquee that dates back to the early part of the last century, benches about every hundred feet or so, and a very warm small town America feeling. It really is like going into a time machine....back about fifty years (although most of the buildings in downtown go back to the 1800's!). We ended up spending ten days in Canon (the only American town spelled with a Spanish Ene, only I can't use one here because it's not on our keyboards). We covered just about every nook and cranny, ate at a bunch of the local eateries, and even made a few side trips to Cripple Creek, Pueblo ( a 25 minute drive), and Colorado Springs (or The Springs, as the locals call it), a 40 minute drive. Here is the summary of our time in Canon City.

We figure that the main reason this area has not become more popular with the tourist crowd is the proliferation of..........the jails!!! Yes, the region is home to six or seven penetentiaries! The coolest one is Old Max, the Colorado territorial prison that sits just on the west side of town, right on US 50. It was built back in the 1800's and has quite a storied past! In fact, you can tour the prison museum to peek at the entire history of the place. There are other jails scattered around the county near Canon and Florence, Colorado, another very picturesque village about 10 minutes down the road. The place is crawling with law enforcement types. You can look at it two ways. One, who wants to be near all these prisons??! The other is, it's a real safe place and it keeps out the riff raff and the Aspen-Vail-Breck crowd away. We're guessing from our time there that the locals like it... just the way it is. In fact, we met one fellow who had just moved to Canon from Santa Fe. He was a retired professor from The University of California, and summed it up for us. "This is a real nice, quiet town, that has everything you need."

So what's so cool about Canon? Here is the short list: Natural beauty. It's almost surrounded by the Wet and Sangre DeCristo Mountain ranges. They help protect the area from the typical Colorado winter weather. They get far less snow than the large towns to the east and north, and it's also warmer. So a milder climate, somewhat similar to Albuquerque. Next, for a small town, there is everything you could think of. Good shopping, terrific restaurants, great places to walk or do outdoor sports of all kinds, and very friendly folks! Most of the homes in town are between sixty and a hundred years old...and in good condition. Lots of Victorian architecture. The downtown is a living museum of fabulous Old West buildings. In the Part 2, we'll go into more detail of some great places we found and the attraction that does bring zillions of tourists to town yearly. Stay tuned.....

Santa Fe Part 2

Ok, where'd we leave off? Can't remember...guess I'm Santa Fe'd out! That's a term we use around the house when we're acting ditzy. Our theory is that the thin air up here is the reason for the sometimes irrational behavior of the townfolk (they really drive weird, for example, like other drivers are invisible!). Anyway....I'm back now. If you've never been, it is a place to put high on the list. Once you get here, here are random thoughts of must do's: Do not (how's that for starting out with Do's?) just go to The Plaza and think you've seen the town, like a tourist would. Most of the interest is on some of the side streets downtown. Make sure to walk Lincoln and Marcy Streets, and zig zag the other little ones that surround The Plaza, especially to the north and east. Then make your way southeast from the east side of The Plaza, down towards Paseo De Peralta (or The Loop, according to locals), and turn south to find Canyon Road. Walk up it as far as you can. It's truly unique. Shops, restaurants, galleries; make sure to go off, on to the little side streets again! If you like walking, Santa Fe is your place. You can walk the downtown streets for days and wander up Canyon Road or over towards The Railyard area or other directions out from The Plaza and still stay constantly entertained. There are really too many great (and many of them are actually healthy!!) places to eat in Santa Fe, to even begin to mention any more than we have already, but here are a couple more. There are SO MANY!! Bobcat Bite (always looks like they're giving away the food from the look of the parking lot), a new place called Real Food Nation, which is another very casual eatery/bakery with the emphasis on local organic food. These two are not anywhere near The Plaza. They're way out on Old Las Vegas Highway. All you have to do is follow the cars! Just remember to get with us if you are going, and we'll give a list to start out with. You will find a few favorites of your own along the way. Outdoor sports of all types are available. We love hiking in the ski area during warm months. It's breathtakingly beautiful. 10,000 Waves, the famous Japanese styled spa is most amazing. You can book a private tub for an hour, get a massage, sit in the communal sauna, all while having nothing to look at but mountain vistas and at night, the most fabulous star show you have ever seen...no additional charge!! If you have time, take a one hour drive north to Taos. It's well worth the effort, and you'll have an excuse to dine at one of our all time favorite places...anywhere-The Trading Post. Ok, next stop, the mountaaaains of Colorado!

Santa Fe Part 1

Who said, "You can't go home again." We sold our second home in Santa Fe in 2005, after almost 11 years of monthly trips up to the mountains. We loved Santa Fe, but decided it was time to expand our travels, and the condo, as much as we loved it, was holding us back. We thought if we want to come back and visit, all we have to do...is do it! We never would have guessed then that would come back with our new second home, Harvey, for a good visit. After being here for just a few days, it already feels great and comfortable, since we're so familiar with this place. First, I'll go back to tell you how we got here from Carlsbad.

We rolled up US 285 on Monday, which cuts right up the center of New Mexico, through UFO town, Roswell, and farther north until the rolling plains and mesas become much more steep, and you start the climb to about 7500 feet to Santa Fe. We're staying at a really nice RV park on the East side of town, actually a few miles from town. Mary Ann wanted to hit the ground running and head for a familiar place for dinner, so we went to venerable old Maria's. This place is more of a locals restaurant in a tourist town and their recipes for Southwest cuisine are basic and straightforward and ALWAYS reliable. No surprises here. To give you an idea, there is a large glassed in area in the dining room where several women are always making tortillas from scratch. Enough said. We spent the rest of the evening walking around The Plaza. If you've never been here, this is where you begin your visit to Santa Fe. It will set the mood for the rest of the trip. We did notice that one of our favorite other eating places, The Plaza Cafe, an ancient real diner, had had a kitchen fire and was closed. We're hoping that it will be open the next time we're here. The next day, we had lunch at one of our all time favorites, Zia Diner. The food is not stellar, but it is really good...and fun. Diner fare; meatloaf, turkey, burgers, etc., all with a Santa Fe twist and all consistantly tasty. The interior (top picture) is worth the trip there too.

So what is it about Santa Fe that makes it so fun to come to? Well....there are too many reasons to love this unique place. The weather. Cool summers and mild winters (cold enough for snow in the ski areas nearby though). The culture. Art of all kinds, film (more movie screens than towns 5 times larger), music, galleries, fashion, you name it. Food. This place is a vortex for foodies. There are literally hundreds of restaurants of all types. Not just New Mexican food. There are terrific Italian, French, American, delis, bakeries, Asian..almost anything you can come up with. The good ones survive, the mediocre don't. There's lots of competition for a small town. Another thing about the food here is that the attention to high quality still prevails. Most places say something on their menu's here about "organic" this or "locally sourced" that. We had lunch today in a new place called Vinaigrette, a predominantly salad menu, where everything on it comes from their own organic gardens in Nambe, a few miles from town. Even their homemade ice cream and desserts are mostly organic. It's hard to find such a variety of places like this almost anywhere. There are 2 Whole Food Stores here, Sunflower Market, a Natural Grocers from Colorado, and other smaller groceries, all catering to people who want higher end food. Again, there aren't that many stores of that type in cities 5 times the size. Even the normal stores carry a much larger selection of "healthy" foods than usual. The other thing that draws us here is the natural beauty. There are gorgeous vistas everywhere you look...and the night sky is like a planetarium! Crystal clear!!

Ok, we mentioned bakeries awhile back. We mean to tell you, you could (and we have!) go wild with them. There are even more here now than when we left a few years back. In fact, this is being written with one hand, while the other is stuffing down a 45 rpm record sized Copenhagen Cinnamon Roll from the Chocolate Maven Bakery and Restaurant! This place is world class. The restaurant has two levels. Make sure to sit downstairs so you can watch the bakers in operation through the large windows. It's awe inspiring! By the way...breakfast is THE meal in Santa Fe. You see, nobody actually works here. It's another one of those unique things. People just get up and go out to breakfast, then at around 10:30 or 11 am they will leave one of the zillions of breakfast places like Chocolate Maven or Santa Fe Baking or Pasquals or Tia Marias,or Tecolote,or..or........., and they go to where they meet somebody else for lunch (which may also serve breakfast all day!). From there, you guessed it, they discuss dinner plans. It's rough, but somebody has to take responsibility, right? What a town. Everyone's either "retired" or living off a trust fund. Stay tuned for part two of our "Coming Back Home Special"....

Carlsbad New Mexico

After heading out from our fun evening in Lamesa, we set sail for Carlsbad, home of the famous caverns. We had a really nice visit with Mary Ann's folks. We brought a lot of good food with us, since we decided the best way to really get a concentrated visit in was to eat at home. Besides, there aren't alot of great choices for dining in town. If we had gone out, out best choice would have been Blake's Lotaburger. Enough said? We did try sneaking out on Saturday night, after the folks had gone home from dinner at our place. We were thinking, "it's Saturday night in the Big City,blah blah..."), and we had spotted a neat looking old hotel called The Trinity that has an Italian restaurant and nice looking bar. Something, we thought, very different for Carlsbad. So we got dressed up in our best jeans and drove on over. We walked in behind another couple and their kids, started for the bar, and were intercepted by the hostess as if we were breaking the line at Studio 54. She sternly looked at Mary Ann and said, "These people were here first. Wait to be seated!" To which Mary Ann replied, "We're here just to look at the bar." I was already eyeing the scene there-two lonely folks who looked like they had permanent seats, and that was it. Not exactly worth gettin' all gussied up fer. The hostess with the mostest kept on about waiting to be seated at the bar....as we were making our getaway. I mean, the rudeness of people today! Crashing the line, just to look at the bar! Well, we drove around town after that little disaster, checked out the mall-sleeping, the other bar-almost asleep, the Wal-Mart parking lot-really busy, but not what we had in mind. We headed back home to Harvey, watched a movie on our Roku Netflix Player, and wondered why we hadn't just decided to do that in the first place. Next stop, our former second home of Santa Fe.....