Santa Fe

It was a typically hot August day in Albuquerque and Lee and I decided to go to Santa Fe to enjoy some fine art and some cooler weather. (SF is usually 10 degrees cooler than ABQ.) We got lucky because as soon as we got to Santa Fe, it clouded up, cooled down to the mid 60s, and rained like crazy for much of the afternoon. Ahh.... felt like home to me! Santa Fe is a world unto itself. There is art everywhere you look, even the buildings are artfully constructed, and every thing is very expensive. And, of course, on a Saturday in August, the town is chock full of tourists! We looked at the long line at the popular Shed restaurant we had read about in our 2011 Fodor's Guide and decided to instead find a delicious and cheap fajita wrap for $5 from one of the food carts in the main square. We found a dry bench in the park under a tree and ate our lunch. Then we opened our umbrella and ran through the rain to land at the New Mexico History Museum and Palace of the Governors. There was an especially interesting special exhibit there about the African Americans' role in settling New Mexico. At 3:30, we were still hungry after our lunch and all the restaurants had shut down to prepare for dinner, but we found a bar that was open. Lucky us! The bar was part of a brand new hotel and their 'bar food' was chef-prepared. We shared bowls of Farmer's Market Soup and Posole stew along with the best tamales we've ever had. It had finally stopped raining so after eating we walked the streets of Santa Fe to look at the shops. Below are our impressions of that afternoon.

Umbrella ready, we set off on a street tour.

 This sculpture is on the wall of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Look closely and you will see it represents a multigenerational family with the ancestors represented as ghost-like faces at the outer rim. We thought it was interesting that every face was depicted with closed eyes, but that the eyes of the baby were wide open.

 In one of the courtyards we discovered this powerful work entitled "Border Crossing" done in 1989 by Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He dedicated it to his father,