We flew into Albuquerque and drove to "Old Town" to eat lunch. It was a lot like the Plaza in Santa Fe....just a little down town area that forms a square and has a park in the middle. We found a little mexican restaurant and thought we were having the first of many mexican meals. It ended up being the ONLY Mexican food we ate the entire trip! The salsa was nice and spicy and the food was yummy. Andrea got a great picture of MA and the guy serenading her!
When we were leaving we found this statue and thought it would be a good group picture. There was a lady sitting on a bench on the sidewalk, so we asked her to take our picture. She took the picture and sat back down, but it didn't really take. We asked her again...and again...and the 3rd time finally worked! She just wasn't holding down on the button long enough. Since she went to so much trouble taking our picture, I think it deserves a spot on the blog!
As we left Albuquerque and headed to Santa Fe, we saw mountains! We had to record the first glimpse of mountains...even though it is from the window of the car as we drove down the interstate!
We made it to Santa Fe and stayed at a great condo! Funny story about the gated condo. We had a garage door opener that opened the gate. It worked great every time we entered the parking area, but we always seemed to have problems with it when we left. The parking area was a circle drive, so there was one entrance and one exit. There was a condo unit in between the entrance and exit, so it was very clear that you had to go in one and out the other. Every time we would drive over to the exit gate, we would have problems with our opener. We would pull up really close to the gate, and then it would swing towards our car as it opened, so we had to hurry and put the car in reverse so that the gate didn't hit the front of it. One day when we were leaving, we could not get the exit gate to open. We went back into the condo to swap openers (there was a spare in the condo). The other opener worked just fine, so we left. Then that opener started giving us problems. We were leaving for dinner our LAST night there and could not get the stupid gate to open so we could leave! MA got out of the car and walked up closer to the gate, pushing the buttons on the opener, trying to get it to open and couldn't. I ran back into the condo and got the 1st opener and tried it. It wouldn't work. Then I got both openers and started walking back and forth pushing them both and pointing them at anything that I thought might possibly be a sensor. In desperation, I turned back to the girls in the car to see if they had any ideas on how to open the gate. An older couple that lived in the condo between the 2 gates had come out of their condo and were informing MA and Andrea that the exit gate had a motion sensor and did not require the openers. Apparently, the entire time we had been staying at the condo, we were opening the entrance gate on our way out! I had noticed a couple of times that the entrance gate was open as we drove by, but I just thought someone happened to get to the condos at the same time we were leaving! It would have been nice to know that we didn't need the openers a little bit earlier in the trip, but the next day (when we were leaving for good) we were able to leave without even TRYING the openers! :)
Anyway - here is a picture of us in front of the condo.
After we got to the condo and unloaded, MA and I wanted to sit and rest for awhile. Andrea was able to sit and do nothing for about 10 minutes before she was begging us to get up so we could go explore Santa Fe! She does not slow down well....always has to be going and doing! Guess that is part of what we love about her! We went down by the plaza and saw this beautiful church...we knew that the oldest church in the US was in Santa Fe, and this church was right in the middle of town and a lot of people were visiting it, so we thought it must be THE church. On our next to last day in Santa Fe, Andrea found the oldest church, and it wasn't this one! We do have a lot of pictures of this church though! When Andrea found THE church, it was after dinner and too dark to take pictures, so we drove by it on our way out of town. MA and I stayed in the car while Andrea took some pictures. She even discovered the oldest house in the US was right next door. Apparently the house was built for the priest to live in, while everyone else lived in tents.
Above - the 3 of us in front of the church we thought was the oldest church.
Below - the actual oldest church....(yes, I know, it makes sense now that the oldest church wouldn't be as elaborate as the one above!)
Below - Andrea in front of the oldest house. She was really excited about getting to see the oldest church AND house, so I thought I should post the picture that has her in it! Some other tourist lady offered to take her picture...
Back to the really pretty church that was not the oldest....even the door was detailed and elaborate. Here is a picture of the door....and all of those little rectangles are metal sculpture type plates. The other picture is of one of the individual plates.
Below - the garden in front of the church had different statues. This one had some beautiful turquoise on it. Of the statues and art in that garden, this one was probably my favorite.
The most frustrating thing about Santa Fe is that everything closes so early! At 5pm all of the street vendors packed up and went home...restaurants closed around 9. Nothing opened until 9am or 10am. When the 3 of us do something in AR, we usually meet at a restaurant around 7:30 or so and stay for a good two or three hours! Sometimes we meet even later and stay until 11pm! Our first night, we went to the La Cantina Sena (I think that was the name) and were able to have 8pm reservations, but little did we know that would be the latest we would get the whole trip! La Cantina Sena was like a broadway dinner theater. The wait staff sang broadway hits in between courses. It was entertaining and something different that you don't find around here.
When we were out exploring, we ran across the tax collector's office. We couldn't resist getting a picture of me by it...even though I'm not a tax collector, I "get" to be the bearer of bad news often enough...one of those "don't shoot the messenger" sort of things!
We took a picture of the Palace of the Governors, not knowing that it would look totally different the next time we saw it! The Native American artisans bring their goods and sell them on the sidewalk, but since it was 5:05 when we took this picture, they were already gone for the day! We took a picture a couple of days later when the sidewalk was full...I'll post that picture on another post.
Andrea thought of a great game that we could play at night at the condo. She thought of personal questions that we had to answer about ourselves, and then try to guess the answers of the other girls. She decided the game could be called Fun University (which MA and I quickly nicknamed FU) and we had freshman and graduate level "courses." The graduate level had harder questions....she surprised us with gifts for playing the game! We all had matching PJs! She liked the shirts because the had '08 on them (the year of the trip) and since they said Univeristy, she named the game after the shirts. You can't tell in the picture, but Andrea's PJ bottoms don't match mine and MA's. Our pants were pink and purple plaid....Andrea claims that they didn't have her size in that color, so she had to get blue and purple plaid....yeah, right! She'll make up anything to get out of wearing pink! :) The other 2 nights MA & I had to come up with questions...it was really quite fun b/c there were some random facts that we learned about each other that we probably wouldn't have found out otherwise. Who knew that we all preferred cinnamon gum to mint or fruity gum!?
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