New Mexico, day one

Today was kind of disjointed, as most travel days are.  I didn't realize how tired I was from the trip to MSP last night.  All the snow and rain made the 87 mile trip into almost a three and half hour ordeal, and then I was up early today to head west.

It is interesting out here.  I wandered around Albuquerque for a bit to start the trip.  Mind you I am on this trip because I was supposed to interview out here.  Not a fan, so it seems to be a good call at this point.  It's big, spread out and fairly strip mall ugly, though I am sure that there are charming parts.  I headed further north to Santa Fe and I like this place.  Smaller, more accessible, and there is some charm here, though it doesn't lack for touristy cliche' filled avenues.  I told someone that in some ways this is heaven if you like Native American art but it is also hell if you do like that genre.  There are exceptional pieces that are just stunning and but there are far more stunningly bad pieces. 

In some ways Santa Fe is a clever city that is designed to separate you from your money...even the bad art is expensive, and the good works are very expensive.  It is almost overwhelming.  But it is beautiful here.  It was almost 70 , and yes, the sky really is that blue.  There were just faint wisps of clouds.  The fancy building was the theater, the less fancy one was the Basilica.  There is a colorful scene from the city park, but I think these are easy to figure out. There are green leaves!!  And there is the best store dog ever--click on any of these to see them bigger

Dinner was fantastic.  You know, we get stuck in the Midwest with just red and green and banana peppers--I counted 14 different kinds of peppers mentioned on my menu tonight.  I settled for just a few of them in my meal, starting with roasted corn and poblano peppers and then red and green tamales with several other kinds of peppers.  They seem to be better than the tamales that I have been microwaving of late...I wonder why?

Tomorrow I had to Taos, though it might take me a while to get there--there is a lot to see!