Santa Fe with Friends and a Family Wedding

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August 13-21--A bit late posting this trip, but we had no longer finished this one than we were heading off North for another and then got a Covid scare.  So enjoy nevertheless.

We had promised to visit our friends Hannah and David, neighbors for many years, in their new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and decided to couple that trip with the wedding with the grandson of Ben’s late cousin as a chance to catch up with the family.  The wedding was in Carlsbad, California, on the California coast about an hour’s drive north of San Diego. 

Hannah and David picked a beautiful city in which to retire—although neither of them will fully retire.  She continues to teach and David is deciding on what to do next.  Not easy when you have a view in the front of the house to see the light and sky change all day long.  In the meantime they have joined the world of Santa Fe, with its arts and music community.

  

 

On arrival we joined them for the "Apprentice Scenes" which is up-and-coming artists’ night at the Santa Fe Opera, where you listen to a variety of scenes from operas which are being performed in full that season or in past seasons and with a view toward future seasons.  With the view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the background and beautiful music it is  quite idyllic.   A fitting welcome to the New Mexico capital’s art and music scene.  

We returned to the opera later in the week for a full performance of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”, which we preceded by a talk from a University of Utah opera professor.  That helped make sense of what is a fairly complicated piece of music.  

Sitting outside with the roof shaped like an awning is really a great way to attend the performance.

 

Santa Fe has turned its old Railroad District into a market and art gallery center.  The market offers handiworks from local pueblos as well as locally grown foodstuffs, with lots of varieties of peppers, a several types of chili peppers, and an old truck as with a huge antenna and imaginary flying saucer as homage to the aliens supposedly arrived in Roswell in the south of the state. Of course the Railroad District has a commuter station for the trains to Albuquerque a 90 minute trip to the South, about 65 miles.  The train is known as the Road Runner, after the cartoon character.

We had the real pleasure of exploring the way New Mexico encourages its artistic community with a visit to the New Mexico Charter High School of Arts.  There the students take a full high school curriculum in the morning and in the afternoon study their artistic specialty which can range from sculpture, to painting, to music (instrumental and composition), to creative writing.  It was the first day of school as we walked through the building in the old Railroad District of the city, one of the oldest in the country, with the head of the school and a member of the board.  

   

Having seen the movie “Oppenheimer” just a couple of weeks before our departure we thought a visit to Los Alamos would be a good thing.  The town is actually visible from David and Hannah’s home, but it’s about an hour away by car.  Most of it is a government research center, not open to the public, but the museum is very interesting and the movie describing the development of the atomic bomb worth seeing. Many New Mexicans say that they were the site of the world’s first atomic bomb, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and call themselves “Downwinders.”  We had an excellent lunch at the Blue Window Bistro.

We later visited the New Mexico Museum of History hill, with some huge outdoor statues.  See if you can find Ben and John in these two pictures: 

 

While all this doesn’t describe our full visit to Santa Fe, it was a very complete five days, finishing up with dinner at an Indian (country, not tribe) Paper Dosa restaurant. 

  

From there it was off to California to a big wedding full of family and old friends, which we enjoyed immensely.