Daryl and Kevin’s excellent New Mexico adventure….

I’m going to have to do this post in installments.  I realize it has been over two weeks since my last post, but really, there was no way I could have found the time to write.

First let me say I had a fabulous two weeks in New Mexico.  The Land of Enchantment drew me in and I loved every minute of it.

My husband found so many things to photograph that I had to cull more than 2000 photos to find the key shots to represent the best of what we did.

The entire vacation was planned by my wonderful husband, and I contributed nothing.  May I say my husband has a second career ahead of him as a travel planner?  I am so very grateful for all his research and hard work, I was too busy preparing for Convergence, and I’m really grateful he allowed me that time.

I learned many things on this trip.

There are some things in life that just can’t be photographed.  They are too big, too vast, too fleeting, too mind bending to even wrap my brain around.  New Mexico is one of them.  The vistas, the gorges, the colors, the night skies, the rain in the distance, the rainbows that appeared drifting up from the desert floor.

That said, my photographer husband took more than 2000 photos and some of them are postcard quality.

We flew into Albuquerque on the 12th, rented a car, and immediately headed to Santa Fe.  We probably didn’t do justice to Santa Fe, we were there wandering around the plaza for a couple of hours, and ended up eating in an outdoor cafe/restaurant, listening to music on the square, and enjoying the dry desert heat. The restaurant was called the Anasazi, and we learned on the trip that Anasazi is actually a politically incorrect term for the ancient Pueblos.  Anasazi is actually

the Navajo term for ancient enemy.  Who knew…

Tuesday morning we made the trek to Taos.  I was enchanted with Taos.  Kevin had read about a church in Taos that had just been remudded, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but he found it and it was breathtaking. The Church was called the San Francisco de Asis, St. Francis of Assisi.

Kevin found a bed and breakfast called the San Geronimo Lodge.  It was really hidden, and it took us awhile to find it nestled back in the hills.  I loved the decor, the artwork, the fact that it wasn’t airconditioned, and that they had a spiritual walk, around the property that had fifteen stops for meditation, small sitting areas with words that made you reflect and meditate, and they led you into a final labyrinth.  I walked the entire thing.

We used this B&B as a base for a couple of days, and had some wonderful adventures.  We found the Rio Grande Gorge, Rt. 64 cuts west across the state from Taos and the vista is flat and unassuming until you suddenly come to a gorge with a sheer drop hundreds of feet down, and the road just continues right across the gorge as if nothing out of the ordinary has come to pass in the landscape.

I managed to walk part way across the bridge.  My husband sprinted ahead and took a few hundred photos of this spectacular hole in the ground.  After awhile, I crept back to the car, my vertigo issues starting to abate, and I happily sat and knitted my pair of socks and waited for him to return.  He even found some grazing long horn sheep at the river’s edge.  I was happy just looking at the photos afterward.  Did I mention I’m afraid of heights?

I’m going to interject here, just a bit of where I’m coming from on this trip.  I live in New Jersey.  A born and bred Jersey girl for more than 50 years.  OK, so I was actually born in Pennsylvania, but it was near the Jersey border around Philadelphia and we moved to Jersey when I was five.  I’ve always prided myself on living in one of the original thirteen colonies.  George Washington has slept in any building that is still standing from the 1700’s.  He crossed the Delaware here, we were a major play in the Revolutionary war, heck, the history of the US started here so to speak.  Or at least I thought so until we went to the Taos Pueblo.  It seems this amazing beautiful complex has been inhabited for more than a thousand years.  With a people who still live there, without electricity, without running water, who don’t take government handouts, and are really really proud of their heritage.  The ancient Pueblos have a history and a culture I can’t even begin to wrap my head around.  The structures came from the mud of the earth, with walls so thick upon entering you’d swear there was air conditioning.  A young Pueblo gentleman, about my son’s age was our guide.  He goes to the University in the fall/winter to study alternative medicine.  He is proud of his heritage.  I feel like an interloper.

Wednesday we got up early and headed north crossing the border into Colorado.  We boarded the Cumbres Toltec Scenic Railroad, in a Parlor Car which is sort of the equivalent of first class, this is the highest and longest narrow gauge scenic railroad in America.  I sat with my knitting needles and just wondered at how vast and how spectacular the American landscape can be.  This little train climbed through a series of switchbacks up thousands of feet, criss crossing the Colorado/New Mexico border something like eleven times.

We passed fields of beautiful colorful Indian Paintbrush, Lupines, and sagebrush.  We entered forests of Aspen. And we traveled along a three foot track hanging on the edges of the most beautiful cliffs, looking down into ancient gorges, rock formations, and never ending vistas. Can I say this was the perfect excursion for my husband and me?  He took photos for six hours straight, from the train station in Antonito, all the way to Osier and back, and I sat happily and watched the vistas pass before me and I knit.

All of this and it is only Wednesday.  Stay tuned for Kevin and Daryl’s excellent New Mexico adventure part 2…