Weekend in Santa Fe

In celebration, we headed just up the road to the state capitol of Santa Fe. It is a beautiful old city, and has the distinction of being both the highest state capitol (7000 ft) as well as the oldest capitol in the US being founded in 1610. It is awash in art galleries, spectacular scenery, and some of the finest dining in the US.

To start off our weekend we attended the the world class Santa Fe Opera on Friday night. We went to the final showing of the Marriage of Figaro at the spectacular open air theater. We got there a good 2 hours before the start of the performance and started to tail gate. As any true Penn State family, we did this in style! We had a pretty decent spread - cheese, bread, grilled pork, fruit, cookies and of course 2 bottles of wine. This tailgating is a common occurrence, as all around us people were setting up picnic tables with white table linens and silver candelabras!


We sat looking across the valley at the beautiful Sangre de Cristo mountains as the sun slowly set behind us, sipping wine. As the performance time neared, we sat and watched the very interesting parade of people head for their seats. On our way in, we spotted actress Ali McGraw, which was especially exciting because that is why Ali is "Ali" - apparently her performance in Love Story really hit home which is why her mom gave her the nickname!

The next day we headed down to the central square of Santa Fe for the annual Indian Market where over 1200 artists and artisans from over 100 tribes gather to showcase their work. We walked around looking at beautiful artwork, and of course some very interesting people watching. That evening we went to the utterly fantastic restaurant The Compound, named one of the top restaurants in the US, where we had one of the best meals of our lives (and those of you who know us well know that that's saying something)!

The next day we headed for home taking a detour from SF up through Los Alamos, stopping briefly to look off the top of the mesa at Santa Fe and the Rio Grande below us, continuing up to the Valles Caldera, a massive extinct volcanic with a volcanic rim 14 miles in diameter surrounding a huge grassy valley of over 140 square miles.

The reason that we travelled here is that the valley is the sometime home for migrating elk herds and finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, Ali's Dad was finally able to see elk here in NM despite the abundance of warning signs all over the state! They are there in the right hand picture if you look closely, they look like a bunch of small hay bales in the middle of the photograph.

We had a great weekend with them, and as always look forward to sharing with visitors our interesting and beautiful state.