Another thing that happened during Spring Break last week….I finally did something I’d been wanting to do since, what, the year 2000? I spray painted my shiny brass lamps with a oil-rubbed bronze spray paint and now I can finally say I love them again.
Now, just no one over maybe 5’8 should walk near them because they will see that the insides are still blindingly brassy.
Really, the only notable thing we did while the kids were off from school all last week was a quick trip to the zoo. Gary left work a little early that afternoon and met us there which made it much more fun. We only had an hour and a half to cover the place so we had to move fast.
The older boys have been there so many times that they didn’t even want to go and
This is the grizzly Gary was howling to. I wouldn’t recommend it myself.
Can I tell you, the primates this day were showing the worst manners! Every one we walked up to look at was doing something way inappropriate. Usually I marvel at how human they seem and it’s usually my favorite part, but this day they were just being too, too gross. I’ll spare you; no pics of that.
Should I go along with getting a haircut and make my mom happy or should I not go along with a haircut and make my mom unhappy? Hmmmm….
Here you can see Sam’s new watch. It’s pretty massive.
This may have to be our Christmas card picture. I finally have one with all four kids and no one is being too goofy.
And this one is pretty good of us, but Jack’s not in because he was taking it.
Caroline’s definitely in her cartwheel phase these days. Everywhere we go.
All Sam wanted to see was an elephant. We saved that for last and once we finally got over there, there were no elephants to be found out in their River’s Edge habitat area. Not one, but he did see this fountain as we were leaving.
You can see it wasn’t thrilling him.
I think we’d better plan another zoo trip.
Sam, all bubble bearded up in his night time bath.
Me, after wrestling Scooter during his bath.
Yeah, one of us looks clean, happy, and relaxed.
Ross and Karen were here on Saturday (yay!) and Ross kept randomly singing out a little riff of a tune. I knew it right away as from Blister in the Sun by Violent Femmes, a huge song from my favorite 80’s. I’ve kept that song around all these years and listen to it every so often. This is the cd I have. 
It was played every night that I was at the top of Page One tavern as a college student in Charleston, even though that would have been 1987ish, a few years past this song coming out on their first album, called Violent Femmes, released in 1983.
The second story of the uptown building would open as a dance bar called Roc’s on certain nights, and I hung out and danced there practically every night it was open. I may or may not (may not if you are Gill children or Harrell parents reading this) have consumed my share of warm quarter-beers (yes, they really cost a quarter!) in the world’s most flimsy plastic cups, so flimsy that they caved in on the sides as you held the cup.
Combine the crappiness of the cups, the craziness of the crowd, and the all the dancing going on, and there was always inches of beer literally covering the dance floor by the early morning hours. Now I wonder how I made it to my morning classes, but I always did.
I had a designated pair of lace-up black leather boots,
Click here to read more about the Violent Femmes. You’ll find they do have a sense of humor.
One thing about living out on this place, here I am sitting at the computer in the kitchen this glorious spring morning. And this is what I look out to:
Things are greening up beautifully after such a long, colorless winter. And see the newly mowed pasture? Nice. Trees are budding. Grass is lush. There’s a just-right cool breeze blowing through the open door as the sun warms this side of the house. Almost perfection….
if not for the dead whatever underneath
the screen porch.
I kid you not, something’s dead and stinking so bad!!
Next day = Sunday. We cooked up some breakfast and checked out of our Santa Fe condo. It was a super windy day. We had an afternoon appointment and didn’t have much time, so we did a grocery store run to get something quick for lunch. Gary scored a nice huge umbrella from the clearance stuff, $3. 
Apparently chicken salad doesn’t even exist in Santa Fe, or at least not at the grocery store we were at, so I 
We spotted an Open House sign like we were hoping for, so we checked it out since we were eager to see more home interiors. We knew the exteriors were so different than what we are used to, and were naturally curious what the inside would be like. The house we happened to stumble upon was a four bedroom, adobe-looking house on a hillside right beside a trail. With a price tag of $950,000. It had rough brick floors throughout (what about your crawling baby’s knees?) with the viga wooden beams and corbels at the top of the porch posts. Not a fancy house at all, but so pricey I guess because of the location and rockscaping. We learned so much from the realtor about the architecture, for example, that the Pueblo features are now more just ornamental and not really structural. The modern houses are wood framed just like at home, but then stucco’d for the adobe look.
Here are a few random samples of the houses of Santa Fe and Albuquerque
This one below was really cool looking!
After the Open House, we made it to our appointment on time despite the GPS scaring me into thinking it’d take another hour to arrive (it stayed on Central time apparently). We treated ourselves to some serious luxury at the 10,000 Waves Japanese Spa. Oh my my. It involved four hours of nakedness in private and communal tubs and showers and saunas and massages and the fanciest toilet on Earth--and I will leave it at that, but if you should ever find yourself in Santa Fe, go there! I have experienced nothing like that before in my life, but never too old for something new, right? It was wonderful. Awkward a time or two, but hey, worth it and definitely memorable.
Gary grabbed some cold Singapore Noodles from their food area to share since we were there so long and were needing a snack after our lame lunch in the car, and those noodles were so good, really like a sweet treat. I want more sometime.
My new favorite Japanese word is Ichiban, and that means “best.” Totally fits the whole experience.
By the way, the spa story was the racy part.
I definitely did not mean our Corolla.
By then it was evening and we were headed back south from Santa Fe towards Albuquerque. We came across another little hole in the wall local Mexican restaurant, our m.o. that so far had been a huge success every meal time we were out. It was a family name and now I can’t recall it, but Gary said it was his most impressive meal of our entire trip. It was in an old Pizza Hut building on the outer edge of Santa Fe on Cerrillos Road.
He had a steak and enchilada and I had a chicken breast with a creamy pineapple sauce with rice and beans and it was so unusual, but so, so good.
I drove us to Albuquerque which is only like an hour from Santa Fe. Gary kept questioning if I was doing ok with the car. It was my first time behind the wheel of the Corolla. I was fine, but the wind gusts were taking me everywhere over the road. By the time we got to Albuquerque, I was exhausted and just wanting to hit the bed. We walked into our room at 
I didn’t care since I was so tired, but Gary went down to complain and see if we could be moved. They gave us a room across the hall as another option, but it was smaller and noisy, too, so we stayed were we were. This was a drastically severe turn-around from our sweet and peaceful Santa Fe and not one Gary was too pleased with, so he did some yoga to help find his inner calm. As I slept, he worked up some shims for the glass door (next morning I wondered why the little bar of hotel soap was crushed into a thousand pieces) and the night was bearable. He McGyvered it somehow with a washcloth.
Monday morning was very cold and windy, but beautifully sunny. We were to return the Corolla that morning, so Gary drove it to the airport and ran back the 4 miles to the Plaza Inn that now he referred to as our motor lodge. He was very pleased to find he could fill the 
It was 30-some degrees and super windy as I mentioned, so Gary wasn’t even that warm by the time he got back from his run. He wanted a hot tub and swim so we got dressed for that to find the pool area was closed for a couple of hours for maintenance. This place was not our favorite hotel for sure by now. But they were very nice in offering to shuttle us around, so we went to Old Town Albuquerque and spent most of the day walking, investigating shops and having, yes, another Mexican 
Gary enjoyed his sunshine and reading time while I cruised through shops to gather some souvenirs for the kids. It took some looking, but we came up with this loot: a little glass kitty for Caroline (got this at the Japanese spa actually), a bracelet and ring for C, maracas for Sam and C, a sheriff badge and pistol for Sam, an Art of Star Wars book for Grant and camo hat for Jack (from yard sales), bullwhips for Jack and Grant (huge and real leather for $6, can you believe that?!), and wood/leather slingshots for all four. The weapon-type gifts come with strict instructions and supervision, so don’t be worrying. It’s not like we brought home another go-cart.
I saw a man being asked to leave one of the gift shops because of his exposed firearm at his waist, even though New Mexico is an open carry state. I noticed the ladies’ purses in the shops were often touted as ‘concealed carry purses.’ Interesting, coming from ol’ Illinois.
Uh-oh, what’s going on? Getting a little too political talking guns and global warming. Here, back to typical Gills-A-GoGo fluff….
Look! My Zumba shoes glow in the dark.
We took a wonderful rest on the side of a sunny slope of this neighboring park to recharge.
Yes, some green!, and then we walked back into the Old T0wn area. 
Here’s when we heard the story about Grant and the go-cart and the lawn mower blade as his brake. It sounded really scary and really funny, all wrapped together.
After a quick but unsuccessful cruise through Walgreens once we realized we might need another carry-on bag to bring stuff home in, we watched break dancers practicing on that yellow town gazebo you can see above Gary’s phone elbow while we waited for our ride.
We did a trial run at packing back at the hotel and found we were ok, if I left the boot box behind and wore my boots. No prob since they were so comfy right from the start. Then we went out for a late supper at again another great Mexican place, La Cuatros, suggested by our driver, Vance. I had a chicken chimi and Gary tried carne adovada, a pork in red chile dish. We left the place stuffed and happy.
Next morning, after a quick breakfast and shuttle to the airport, we were on our plane back home. Well, after that little incident with the wrong boarding passes. Somehow we must have tossed the ones printed out for our return flight and accidentally tried to reuse the ones we had originally coming out on the trip. I got us ejected from the line we had been waiting in when I presented the used ones and we had to start over again. And Gary stubbed his bare toe in the security screening area, but other than that it was a most fabulous vacation.
No plane crisis either direction, so yay!
Thank you, family, for supporting us leaving home for a few days and helping out in all ways that you did. I regret that we left so early on April 1 and missed the chance for an entire day of pranks on the kids, but hey, there’s next year.
Moral of the story: Everyone should visit Santa Fe! And don’t wait so long for such a rockin’ vacation!
As I was last saying, it was a beauty of a drive around this Los Alamos area on Rt. 4. I haven’t really included about the weather yet, but generally while we were there, it was cold at night, in the 30’s, and crystal clear and sunny during the days, maybe around 60-some degrees. It wasn’t hot like I was expecting out West would be. We were at a high elevation and it is desert and just the start of Spring. In fact, we saw snow along the high roads here as you’ll see below.
This pointy triangle visible in the lower center is a communication thingy for Los Alamos. Gary wanted a picture of that.
I’d had him take his own picture of it, but he kinda needed to focus on driving since beyond this shorty of a railing is a sheer drop off of I-don’t-even-want-to-know. We were pretty high up. The Corolla was not the best car for these roads. Little, yes, but not very mighty.
These are scenes within Bandelier National Monument. We are up high here, looking down onto the bottom of the canyon where we are about to go see Pueblo stuff.
And now we are down. But actually I am kinda up high.
<<<<
This is the second climb where I was sorta noticing the less- oxygen- air.
New Mexico=No bugs, no sweat, no humidity. So Southern Illinois opposite. I was loving it. But you do really have to carry water around with you.
We didn’t stay long in Bandelier since we had more great things to do. We saw mule deer along the road. We noticed that they didn’t seem to mind the Los Alamos National Lab signs along this fence that said
KEEP OUT -- EXPLOSIVES.
Brave deer.
Here’s some snow on our drive as we travelled on towards Jemez Springs. I think this is at about 10,000 feet. Or at least somewhere I read we were at that elevation. There are some peaks at 12,000+.
We planned to go there but suddenly seemed to just happen upon the Valles Caldera before we expected it. It’s this collapsed crater of a long, long ago volcano that now looks like an immense grassy meadow area. It was so out of place for the mountainous and/or forested terrain we had been driving through. I wish I had snapped a shot with a barn in it so you could judge the expanse of ground this covers. It is a 15 mile diameter.
Here are elk we spotted within the crater valley, just below the tree line. No antlers yet. Gary looked with his binos. Maybe that’s why our suitcases were close to the 50 pound limit. We brought a bunch of stuff.
As we drove on, Gary spotted this site with this weird cattle like chute and the picturesque river and rocks. He parked the car, and said “We are hiking in there.” No discussion. It was an order. It turned out to be his favorite site of the whole trip.
We crossed the river on a log to get to this point where the canyon kinda just closed in and the river really narrowed.
It took me a few minutes to work up the nerve to cross, but so glad I did since the view was so cool. I originally was having a hard time with the idea of hiking all the way back with wet feet or worse yet, wet clothes. No worries, though, after all. Plus, Gary found me a stick so that made me feel much more stable.
We came upon a group of campers and there were to be waterfalls on further, but we ended our adventure here since it was going to take awhile to hike back out and it was going to get dark very soon.
We now just wanted to get back to our nice homey place in Santa Fe, but we had to keep on driving in the mountains to get out. After a certain length of time, you can get tired of winding and the inclines and declines. Especially in the dark. The drive through Jemez Springs would have been unbelievable, I could tell even in the dark. The sheer and colorful mountain cliffs of the mesa walls were the backdrop for the little homes in the village alongside the road. I didn’t know it (since I was busy snoozing), but Gary had to drive another two hours to get us back to our place, even after getting out of the mountains and on to the highway. We had really covered some ground that day, I guess. Long way home.
Oh yeah, can’t forget this. We were really super tired and it was getting late and wouldn’t you know, once we finally got to our place, we were locked out. Both of our key cards were demagnetized. Lesson learned: Don’t keep your hotel key near your cell phone. Gary had to call someone who lived about 20 minutes away to come meet us to get us new keys that worked. No supper even that night since we were so wiped out, but we did crack open the Breyer’s for a quick bowl each before our eyes fell shut.
Part 3—the final part is coming.
