Northern New Mexico

I spent one day driving through northern New Mexico.  I had a lot of ground to cover, so everything got short shrift, but I felt like I got a little taste of the area.

My first stop (after spending the night in Gallup) was in Albuquerque's old town.  I found it pretty charming, although most of the storefronts are, um... stores.  But most of the stores were pretty unique, selling stuff like old west style clothes, hand-made textiles, hand-made jewelry, other art, etc.

Old Albuquerque's town square

I also stopped at The Albuquerque Museum, which is half art museum and half history of New Mexico museum.  At the museum, I learned that several cities in New Mexico are older than most of the midwest (even the Great Lakes and Mississippi areas) because the area was explored by Spanish Conquistadors and settled by the Spanish back in the early 1500's.  I felt kind of stupid for not knowing that already.  And I thought it was pretty cool to see exhibits about early America containing armors, weapons, furniture, art and crafts that would be at home in an exhibit about medieval Europe.  Sorry I couldn't take any photos inside the museum; you'd see how out of place the European-New Mexican artifacts are compared to everything from the east coast.  But here's a photo of a dude's head:

Sigmund Freud was from New Mexico?

A couple of artists I talked to in Albuquerque recommended I stop for lunch in Madrid, NM on my way to Santa Fe.  So I did, stopping at The Mine Shaft, a place that's been around since the 1940s and which opened just a few years before all the nearby mines closed, leaving Madrid a near ghost town.  Anyway, I ordered the chili and it was the best chili I've ever had.  I wish I'd ordered a few orders, and just eaten it for my next several meals.  I'm salivating right now (more than two weeks later!) just thinking about that chili.  Mmm... chili...!

If you're ever in Madrid, NM, stop here for some chili!

Santa Fe was disappointing.  Maybe I just wasn't in the right spots.  Maybe I was tired.  Maybe I knew I still had a few hours of driving ahead of me.  More likely, what was once (probably) a charming and picturesque little town is now just a tourist destination, full of people shopping for stuff.  I've heard that Santa Fe has the highest number of artists per capita (a quick internet search reveals Santa Fe is either number one or pretty close to it) so there must be a number of galleries that sell really awesome stuff.  But my aimless wanderings didn't take me past anything that really stood out to me.  /shrug/  Maybe I just lost my wandering mojo.  I must have, because I learned later that while I wandered past one impressive church, I failed to find The Loretta Chapel, home to a very famous and mysterious spiral staircase.  Bah.

Santa Fe's old town main square

The doors of the church I did find, which depicts 500 years of the secular and sacred history of Santa Fe.