The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I can’t believe how quickly two weeks have flown by (not to mention the 200 bucks I pulled out of the ATM). Although we still have plenty of time left to enjoy ourselves, I am already starting to get those end-of-summer pangs. I don’t know if I’ve ever had them this early in the summer before. Partly that’s because, while I’m having a great time, I don’t think Santa Fe has cured me of my restlessness. A list, to illustrate:

Thursday.
Went on a morning run, saw the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, leftovers from Corinne’s chicken throwdown for dinner, salsa at Willee’s Blues Bar. Still can’t do 3 miles without stopping—high altitude, weak cardio, there goes training for the half-marathon; put on cute jeans and paid a $5 cover to NOT dance and get snubbed by the adorable 23 year old trumpeter we met last Saturday at El Farol.

Friday.
Cooking class at the culinary school. Interesting stuff about the (culinary) history of this region—food is a great way to teach history, as it turns out. Got rained out of the gallery walks but had a hilarious game night instead. However, do I really need to nap as much as a toddler does?

Saturday.
Went on a morning “run,” drove to Taos for the Powwow, had dinner at Los Mayas and a drink at the Hotel St. Francis Bar. The Powwow had some amazing dancing and regalia, adorable children, frybread (of course), and a ton of white people with big cameras—apparently very different from the powwow these girls went to two years ago.



Still can’t make it up the hill on Old Santa Fe Trail. Yesterday, I just gave up and walked home. Last night I ate so much pollo en mole that I went to bed feeling like a python that swallowed a peccary. Yves is going to kick my arse when I get back to Equinox. I sleep 8 hours a night in a comfortable bed and I still have huge bags under my eyes every day.

Don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking. I’ll just stop there…

What becomes of a dream deferred?

For weeks now, even since we were in the car dodging state troopers in Virginia, I have been hearing of Amazing Larry. It was hard to piece everything together, not having been on BLSF campus two years ago, so I assumed Amazing Larry was some crazy older dude in a Hawaiian shirt (a sort of Santa Fe Bingo Gazingo).

Today I found out that Amazing Larry is not just a dude. Amazing Larry is actually the name of a band, an earnest/ironic sometime acoustic, sometime trio of hipsters who cover Bon Jovi and Journey and do the occasional original tune about Molly Ringwald.

We saw them at Evangelo’s, a dive on the corner of the plaza made famous by the proprietor’s father—the subject of a WWII photo that became a stamp. It’s an iconic image you’d recognize if you saw it, and according to yelp.com, Nick, who tends bar in a Panama hat, persistent cigarette hanging from his lips, tells the story to anyone who even thinks about asking.

So after getting turned around by a series of one-way streets (Corinne: Oh, just turn down one of these; we’ll find it.) and taking 20 minutes to parallel park on a curve, we finally paid our $5 cover—only to find the bar filled with enough people to count on one hand and a lone bald man doing Beatles covers. We headed to the dingy basement, where at least Outkast’s greatest hits were playing (videos too). Eventually, Corinne beckoned us upstairs and I was introduced to the legend that is Amazing Larry. Most entertaining (even more entertaining than their AC/DC finale) were the lead singer’s parents sitting in a corner, swaddled in sweatshirts and slowly sipping red wine.

Right now there’s talk of having them over to the house. “Larry” (Andy) gave us his card, so we’ll see…

Tent Rocks

I think this spectacular, lava-formed lunar landscape speaks for itself.
Tent Rocks National Monument...

Is that a Mesa or a Crested Butte?

It’s a lot harder to find the answer to that question on Google than it should be (complicated by the fact that both Mesa and Crested Butte are names of towns). We’ve been passing a lot of them, and we did in particular last night on the way to Ojo Caliente to…wait, wait, don’t tell me: soak in hot springs. Really. I’m not kidding. My skin is going to fall off. Actually, Ojo was beautiful—9 pools with cliffs in the backdrop (illuminated at night, of course) and I felt full of mineral-y goodness: iron, soda, arsenic. Arsenic is supposed to be good for the skin. I don’t know—I went into the sauna, opened up my pores, and soaked in arsenic, figuring I’d wake up in the morning beautiful or dead (very Emma Bovary). Neither happened, (un)fortunately, but it was a fun night anyway, and so so dark on the way home, with lightning storms flashing in the distance over the mountains.

I also did a little piddling around in town today—hit the oldest church in the US (Mission San Miguel: awesome altar piece), saw a very famous statue of Mary in the Cathedral (real hair! real clothes! born in 1625!), relived an Unsolved Mysteries moment at the Loretto Chapel staircase (33 steps, 2 complete 360 degree turns, completely free-standing, and, as legend has it, built entirely with a saw and some cups of water to bend the wood by a mysterious carpenter who appeared on the ninth day of a nun’s novena and never stayed to claim his pay). I also discovered that I have no interest in most of the shops on the Plaza. I’m holding out for the flea market to buy folk art and jewelry. In the meantime, how about a shopping poll? Please guide my hand about an expensive but fabulous dress!

I’m Interested in Learning How to Box

It’s not that I want to look like Hillary Swank in Million Dollar Baby (I do, before that whole messy gangrene/euthanasia thing), it’s just that I hate crowds, and I think that maybe knowing how to throw a punch would’ve come in handy this past weekend as we elbowed our way through the plaza on Fourth of July, elbowed our way into cliff dwellings at Bandelier, and elbowed our way on the dance floor at El Farol (our neighborhood bar, if you can use that term to refer to a place with an $8 cover). Not that it was a bad weekend—in fact, it was great—but really, people, don’t you just want to stay home with your families?

In grand Bread Loaf tradition, the weekend was gin-sodden (like Kris’ shirt, when some chick in stilettos bumped her on the dance floor on Saturday night), not to mention full of dessert and adrenaline-y goodness. Chrissy’s boyfriend was here for the weekend and our Fourth of July cookout rocked (bison burgers and organic dogs: yum!). If I had some BL prof making me nature journal, perhaps I could offer up a good description of our Saturday trip to Bandelier, but suffice it to say that we hiked among some really alien-looking cliffs that used to be dwellings for an ancient pueblo. You can also climb up ladders to look inside the cliff dwellings (and knock your noggin against the cave wall). As Kris said, the humans make it difficult—fear of heights is one thing, fear of heights when some schmo isn’t letting you pass is another.



And one more word on crowds: as much fun as it was to dance to Radio La Chusma, the Latin rock/hip-hop/reggae band at El Farol on Saturday, it was made more entertaining (or perhaps more annoying) by the crowds of post-Suppressed Desires BLers. Now, the white polo and the shaggy blond hair—is that your costume or are you just coming from a photo shoot for next year’s catalogue? What about the dude in the long skirt, cardigan, and bucket hat—is he going for an homage to Courtney Cazden? So far, we don’t know anyone on what seems to be a campus full of first-years in the throes of mid-term hookups. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Road Trip Haikus #4, 5: Las Golondrinas Ranch, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Hippies at a wine fest
Peddling local cabernets
Chrissy loves Riesling

Afternoon storm clouds,
rain and dust from the mountains:
girls get adobed.

Casa del Sol

For those of you interested in checking out our digs, here are some photos of the house:

It's a beautiful adobe house with blue window and door frames, two master suites, and three bathrooms.



The upstairs hallway



The living room



A cool bench in our dining room



The wall of windows in our dining room. Note the antler chandelier. I didn't take a picture of the dining room proper because the table is covered with our crap.



Our kickass backyard.

More soon!

The Summer of the Bath

It feels like years have passed since the last post and really all that’s passed is Texas. But Texas (well, the panhandle) is vast and flat—nothing but scrubland for miles in every direction. Actually, Texas was pretty awesome. We saw a Route 66 landmark in Shamrock and then moved on to Amarillo, where we had good barbecue, for a change, and saw another cool roadside landmark, the Cadillac Ranch (we even left a permanent mark: Go Yetis!).



The "U-Drop Inn" in Shamrock, Texas.



"Cadillac Ranch" on the Texas plains.




And then it was onward to Santa Fe. The last five pounds are always the hardest to lose. Likewise, the last 200 miles… But finally, we made it amid a crazy thunderstorm over the mountains. When the weather finally cleared, we found ourselves at Casa del Sol, a beautiful adobe house with two master suites, a beautiful patio, and tons of other great amenities. (Pictures to come… internet reliability is not one of the amenities.)

To our pleasant surprise, the house is literally paces (150 was the over/under) from Santa Fe’s famous strip of galleries, Canyon Road, and we had awesome tapas at El Farol for dinner last night. Today, we got ourselves oriented—determined the closest walking route to the Plaza, bought groceries, and planned our calendar for July. I almost died running uphill to St. John’s College (it’s only about a mile, but at 7000 feet, that’s a lot), and then made it back around toward our summer home.

We topped our day off with a trip to Ten Thousand Waves, yet another natural spring spa in what promises to be a summer of soaking in hot tubs. It was a rotation from the tub to the cold plunge to the sauna, and now we are all too blissed out to move.

The next couple of days should be full of Santa Fe museums, 4th of July festivities, hiking in Bandelier, and the Santa Fe Wine Festival. More pictures and stories soon…