SANTA FE...

Our little visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico...

We shared a ride to Santa Fe with our good friends - and they had never seen the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo - so of course we had to stop!

In Tucumcari we stopped for a snack and we found a cool coffee shop with an old airplane theme! It was connected to this retro motel.  It was a nice stop and we enjoyed visiting with the owner.  We even stopped back by here on the way home!

Santa Fe has a LOT of art galleries and wonderful sculptures all around town.  We also went to a farmer's market on Saturday morning there.

We took a trolley tour that gave us some of the history of Santa Fe.  This is one of the few remaining true adobe houses.  The same family has lived in it over 100 years.  Adobe is high maintenance our tour guide explained - it has to have another coat of mud put on the house every 5 years!  Very cool that the family that lives here is dedicated to maintaining that.  

The beautiful doors of one of the old churches there.  We walked into several missions (old churches) there - kinda reminded me of Europe!

This was the strangest thing ever.  ZOZOBRA.  It's actually something we caught on TV at night in our room.  But it was happening locally.  We didn't care to pay $10 to get caught up in this with 27,000 others.  Zozobra is the oldest community festival (supposedly) in the US.  A huge puppet (about 30 feet high) is set on fire after everyone writes their woes down on a piece of paper at it's feet.  A woman in a red costume was dancing around it as well.  The puppet's arms moved and it roared a lot before catching on fire.  It was really strange and reminded me of the golden calf or some old ancient sacrifice.  

Rock paper scissors sculpture!

You see a few donkey sculptures around because many years ago they would load them with wood and send them down to a certain place near the plaza so people could buy it.

This is me and one of my friends in one of my favorite sculpture gardens.  These are all for sale.  I could really drop some dollars here if I had them to burn!

We also ate a lot of good food but nothing to rave about.  Really the BEST thing about the trip was meeting up with our longtime friends and just spending some quality time with them.  Which is how it should be...