2026 Condo Week: Ruidosa & Santa Fe, part 3

This is part three of this post. You should read 'em in order. Here's a link to part one. And here's a link to all the pictures from this trip.

Fifth Day (Wednesday) 

We didn't have a lot of plans for the day. We needed to do laundry, and we wanted to see the Scotland:Brazil match in the World Cup at 4pm ... well, some of us wanted to. Yeah, okay, I was willing to watch it, too, even though I knew as well as anybody else that Scotland had not a prayer in that matchup. So we kind of took it easy. I had some leftover pasta for breakfast -- who knew such a thing existed? Pasta, left over! -- while Sherry and Nancy had their usual porridge and Jeff had a frozen breakfast sandwich that he seems to actually like. (I tried one once; not to my liking at all.) Then Sherry took the laundry up the hill and sat with it for a while. When I finished whatever I was doing -- I don't remember what it was -- I went up and relieved her until the clothes were done. By then it was getting on toward lunch time, so we went into "Midtown" -- what locals call the central part of the village --to a place called the Village Buttery to get something.

 

Here's the TL:DR version: this is absolutely the best meal we had in Ruidosa or Santa Fe. I had a roast beef sandwich piled high on excellent sourdough bread, while everyone else had some kind of quiche. All fantastic. The place is a little bit of a madhouse, with only about four tables inside and two or three on the patio out front, and customers lined up waiting to order at the counter and employees gossiping and joking around with the customers. Every town needs to have a place like this. And the desserts! OMG, the desserts! Nancy and Jeff each had a slice of caramel cheesecake, and Nancy got some cookies for later. I don't remember if Sherry had anything; I'm inclined to say she didn't. Meanwhile, I had a slice of buttermilk pie. But not ordinary buttermilk pie. Ordinary buttermilk pie is like what God would eat if he couldn't get a proper peanut butter pie (which is often the case; I've found two in the last 40 years, and one of my sources went out of business when I wasn't looking; the other one died). No, this buttermilk pie is so good that God would order it in preference to a proper peanut butter pie. It was absolutely the best anywhere. I cannot imagine a better buttermilk pie. It just can't exist.

 

Just down the street from the Village Buttery is the Wingfield House Museum. This modest 1920s-vintage house was the home of a locally prominent family who owned a great deal of land in the area, and several businesses. The museum contains interesting old maps of the area and the state, photos of the town and people in the early 20th Century, and some period furnishings. It had, in essence, something to interest everyone in our group.

Next, we drove back out to the Mescalero reservation south of town, to revisit St Joseph's, the Apache Mission church. This large building was erected in 1920 and is undergoing preservation efforts now. It forms an imposing space, and has all the typical accoutrements of a Catholic church, but done in a style consistent with the local community's architectural sensibilities. It was deserted while we were there, but we could sense that it was at the heart of a vibrant group.

 

 

Oh, and by the way, Scotland's performance against Brazil was utterly dismal, as I expected it to be.

Sixth Day (Thursday)

 

I was awake early, lying in bed listening to screaming outside. It took me a while to realize I was listening to foxes in the woods surrounding our condo; I had only ever heard them on Midsomer Murders before. It was a kind of magical experience. 

 

not sure what this is

Our plans called for a walk along the Ruidoso River path, looking for fairy doors, before breakfast. We found the river -- hard to miss, after all -- but the fairy doors all seem to have been washed away in the flood that went through this area a couple of years before. We could see there had been substantial damage in this low-lying area; nearby houses were deserted, half-destroyed, and piles of brush remained to be collected and removed. Pilings supporting the riverbank were pulled away and had not been repaired. 

 

Or maybe the fairy doors had just been relocated, because at our next stop, Wingfield Park, there were a dozen or so of them scattered around on trees for kids to find. There was also an enclosed botanical garden which was nice without being spectacular. 

Amazon MGM Studios

Having seen that, we repaired to the Cornerstone Bakery for another excellent breakfast, then back to our condo for a viewing of the movie The Sheep Detectives, starring Hugh Jackman as the dead guy; Patrick Stewart as the Old Fogey; Emma Thompson as the solicitor; Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Lily, the world's smartest sheep; and Bryan Cranston as Sebastian, the sheep who doesn't forget anything. It's a mix of live-action and some kind of animation, maybe computer-generation? I don't know, don't care. It was a wonderful, imaginative murder mystery, and fun to watch.

Then, continuing our theme, we watched half of the Ecuador:Germany match from the World Cup, before taking a nap in preparation for dinner at a place called Rio Grande. My notes on this trip tell me that I had a beef stew. I remember ordering it, but not eating it. In fact, despite having looked at all the photos of the place posted on Google Maps, I have no recollection of anything about it except the skull on the sign outside. No idea why. My notes also tell me that we watched two World Cup matches there (presumably at the same time; I can't imagine that even we would sit there for five hours to watch soccer, World Cup or no.) We were back at the condo to see the US play Turkey in one of the most exciting, if disappointing, matches to that point in the Cup.

 

 

Seventh Day (Friday) 

Unfinished church nave at Gran Quivira

After checking out of our condo, we headed up the road toward Santa Fe, stopping along the way to visit Gran Quivira, one of three ancient villages that make up the Salinas Pueblo National Monument. Gran Quivira was the largest of the three. It started out as a collection of kivas, then the Spanish came along and started building churches to go along with that. Gran Quivira had a church and a half: the second one was started but never finished. 

 

What's left are just ruins, but are impressive nonetheless if only for their scope. The settlement occupies an entire hilltop, more than 600 acres, with vistas stretching off into the distance in every direction. It hasn't all been excavated, but one part that has includes a pueblo with over 200 rooms, mostly small (probably storerooms) that just go on and on. Some of them were used for religious purposes kept hidden from the interfering Spanish priests. We spent above an hour at the place in the heat of the day. 

 

We drove from there up to Mountainair, a small town that is home to both the Salinas Pueblo National Monument Visitors' Center and, more importantly, the Shaffer Hotel, which as a reputable dining room where I could get the "Annie Oakley," which is essentially a Philly steak sandwich served in a tortilla and smothered in some kind of cheese sauce. Not bad, not bad at all.

 

Whenever four people spend essentially every hour of every day together, there are always going to be some nerves rubbed raw. I think we all recognise that, but to help us over those occasions, I decided to get one of those king-sized Snickers bars, with two candy bars in the package. There was a problem with paying the bill -- a long and not very interesting story -- so the waitress just comp'd me the candy bars by way of apology. I wanted Snickers bars in particular because of those commercials they used to run with the slogan, "You're not yourself when you're hungry." I planned to save them for when somebody -- hopefully not me -- went off the rail a little. But I made the mistake of leaving them in the fridge in Santa Fe without my name on them, and one of them disappeared during the night. Just vanished. (It magically reappeared in slightly altered wrapping two days later.). 

 

There was a nice rain while we were having lunch, so it was significantly cooler when we came out of the Shaffer and went a block over to the Visitors' Centre. There we watched a video about the pueblos and the history of Spanish interference in the local community, and browsed through the little museum the Park Service has put together. I had planned this route to Santa Fe just so that we would have something to see along the way; I hadn't realized it'd be so very fascinating. 

 

But a word of advice if you're thinking of visiting the place yourself: make sure your gas tank is full. It's a looooooong way from there to anywhere.

 

 

The Santa Fe add-on (Saturday and Sunday)

 

In Santa Fe, Nancy had booked us into a VRBO unit, a casita -- not quite one of those tiny houses you see on unscripted faux-reality shows on TV; just a little apartment in the central part of the city. It was the smallest, least expensive unit she could find that had two bathrooms. And let's face it, that is an overriding priority in our experienced travel group. 

 

The whole two-bedroom, two-bath unit, with kitchen, dining area, and living room with fireplace would have fit easily into the three downstairs rooms at the front of my house. It was snug. But not uncomfortably so. In fact, as travel lodging goes, it was kind of nice. I liked it; I think Sherry did, too, and Nancy. Jeff didn't say a single word about it, so I don't know his opinion. But for cost and location, you really couldn't beat it. And it had hooks all over the place, to hang things on. And the hot water heater was somewhere nearby. And it had a hand-held shower head (although Sherry told me later that she couldn't figure out how to detach it from the mount: it was magnetic, and the magnet was surprisingly powerful; I struggled with it too, until I figured out the secret of the design).

 

Another great feature was the neighbourhood it was in, within walking distance of the main plaza of the city. Though we were more interested in the businesses surrounding us on the road. Next door was a terrific bakery-cafe called Boultawn's, where I had breakfast every morning (the first morning I just brought pastries back from there); a few doors down was another bakery, but they didn't open until nine. What kind of bakery doesn't open until nine? I never went there, because of that. There was also a trattoria called Lino's, where we ended up having a very nice meal on our last evening in Santa Fe. And there were a host of coffee shops and music shops and some interesting-seeming other restaurants that we just didn't have enough time to check out (though we did go to the Salvadoran place across the street, and Nancy and Jeff got takeout from the Chinese place on the corner one evening, when Sherry and I had leftovers to feed on. 

 

So we had Saturday and Sunday in Santa Fe. We had a plan for Saturday that involved a lot of sightseeing in the central area of town. Sadly, we had not figured on the gay folk of Santa Fe. There was some kind of Gay Pride event taking place, and the downtown streets were closed off and there was no parking available. So, Plan B: we drove out to a place called Teseque Glass, a glass school and studio some distance from the town center. There are several pieces that I liked very much, but I don't think I'm going to buy any. My collecting days are, I think, pretty much over, along with my county-counting and solo-travelling days. (I could be wrong; last time I visited SiNaCa in Fort Worth, there was a very nice piece in their gallery that I still think about buying -- if they even still have it -- and I keep thinking I just might take a quick trip up to Ft Worth to see.)

 

After Teseque, we started for a scenic route up a mountain, but we got sidetracked, what a shock, by food. It was lunchtime and we were all hungry, so we got wraps at a place called The Wrap. Jeff seemed to be having some kind of medical issue, so we decided to take our lunch back at the casita, so Nancy could check to make sure she'd given him the right batch of meds that morning. She had not, it turned out, and they were putting him to sleep. She did some chemical thing to ameliorate the situation, but we decided that instead of going back out we would stay in to watch England play Panama in the World Cup. No arm-twisting needed there.... And we got to watch the game without feeling selfish. 

 

Jeff was all better the next morning, and went with me to Boultawn's for breakfast. I had an excellent breakfast burrito, with deliciously soft, fluffy eggs and a really nice salsa verde. Jeff got avocado toast on a bialy, which is like a bagel but without a hole in the middle. On top of the avocado paste was some kind of sliced food that looked like a peeled grapfruit. The baker, when he came out to see how everything was, said it was slices of watermelon radish, which I have never heard of. Jeff said it tasted pretty good and that he liked the texture of it.

 

I also got two biscochito bagels to take back to the casita. "Biscochito" is a local thing, a particular type of twice-baked cookie with cinnamon and sugar crust. Boultawn's makes bagels with a similar flavour, and we split a couple for the local experience. It wasn't as good as it sounded, but at least we tried the local dish. Sort of.

 

gay pride mascot

Sherry and I took a long walk, from our casita down to the southern edge of downtown, past the Basilica and through the main plaza back to our casita, a total of about two miles. Mainly it was intended as a physical challenge for me, to walk so far (especially at that altitude), but it was also a chance to check out the center of town after all the partying had ended. Then the four of us went up to a place called Fort Marcy Hill -- where the US Army had placed a garrison during the Mexican War in the 1840s, because all of the city was in range of their guns from there. There's nothing left of the fort but some barely-visible remnants of its foundations, but the hill is a popular spot for watching the sun set. That's what we did up there, and it was magnificent.

Sunset over Santa Fe from Fort Marcy Hill

We went sightseeing on Sunday morning. I was doing the driving now; I forget why, except that I like driving and Nancy doesn't. I had found riding in the back and staring out the window all the way from Colorado oddly relaxing (even while Sherry was afraid we were going to drive off a cliff on the way up to Monjeau Lookout), but I also found that the lack of floor-space in the back seat made my feet and knees hurt in an unusual way. It was much better up front. 

 

Our first stop was the Loretto chapel, probably the most famous site in the city. It was the church of a group of nuns in the 19th Century, and it had a choir loft that they could only get to by ladder. There was no room for a regular staircase. So naturally, they prayed to St Joseph (patron saint of carpenters), and whaddaya know, a carpenter turns up out of the blue, builds them a magical spiral staircase that has no structural support, and disappears without taking any kind of payment. This shows that God loves Catholics (and Donald Trump) more than other people, because other people have to pay for what they get.

 

Now, I had seen the magic stairs on an earlier visit, so I dropped everybody off and went to park. Since we were so close to the casita, I said I would probably just go back there. But I spotted big empty parking lots just across the river from downtown, at State offices, and sho'nuf they were only reserved on weekdays. So I parked there and waited to hear from the others. 

 

When I did, we arranged to meet up at the next site on our list, the church of St Michael, which is the oldest church in the United States. There was another State parking lot across the street from that, so I moved the car there and waited for them to walk the three blocks or so from the Loretto. In that time I ascertained that St Michael's was already closed for the day. We looked around the outside a little, and then moved on. We walked over to the main plaza, checking out art galleries along the way (I'm interested in acquiring a couple of Western-art sculptures or maybe a couple of busts) but it was all ugly, overpriced or, simply, too monumental. I have no desire to own a garishly painted bronze Apache chief, a $50,000 elephant, or an eight-foot-tall copy of a Remington warrior-and-eagle sculpture. Guess I'll stick to the weekly sales at the auction house back home.

 

When we were done sightseeing in the plaza, I went to fetch the car and picked everyone up at the corner. We had lunch at the Salvadoran place I mentioned, which is just across Guadalupe Street from the casita. We had some leftovers to stash, so we went across the street to store them, and somehow -- I can't begin to imagine how we might have found this out -- discovered that Canada was playing South Africa on television at that very moment! So we stopped a while to watch before heading out for our last sightseeing ventures in the New Mexican capital.

 

Gunnison Prairie Dog

There's a national monument located on an Indian reservation some thirty miles southwest of town that reportedly has some unique rock formations. It sounded like a good place to go, but first we had to put some gas in the Dog Show Leviathan. While doing that, I noticed some little tail-less animals cavorting on the edge of the gas station's apron, and called out to the others to take a look. Turns out they're Gunnison Prairie Dogs. There's apparently a large colony of them in Santa Fe.

 

Ethel

Next we stopped off to see Ethel the Blue Whale, on the campus of the local community college. It was constructed a few years back by some students as a sort of environmental consciousness-raising exercise. It's made entirely out of recycled materials from the landfill, and has become something of a local landmark. Easy to see why. 

 

 After a half-hour drive down the freeway and another fifteen or twenty minutes negotiating two-lane state roads, we arrived at the entrance to this National Monument. Not only was it closed; it required reservations and the purchase of timed-entry tickets, with the last entry at 1pm before a 4pm closing. And the tickets can only be bought from the tribal office a mile or so up the road leading to the entrance. Obviously, the tribe desires that outsiders not bother visiting this particular beauty spot.

 

So we went the other way --  to another beauty spot some miles northeast of Santa Fe. There's an overlook up in the mountains, in Hyde Memorial State Park, from which you supposedly get a very nice view of the city of Santa Fe. And yes, there was a nice view of the city from up there. We stopped to look at it briefly, and all of us expressed an interest in visiting the bathroom that undoubtedly existed at the trailhead just a short way farther up the hill. A few minutes later, I noticed that Jeff was already halfway there. I told Sherry & Nancy I would drive up there and give him a ride, because I needed to go too. They seemed uninterested, but it turned out they hadn't heard.

 

 There wasn't a bathroom at the next trailhead, but there was at the one after that, and we found what we needed. And while I was in there, I got text messages that I just knew were from Sherry (I was not going to even look at my phone while standing over an open pit), saying they needed a ride, too. And I was right. They were waiting at the first trailhead and were so relieved when I got back down to them. The walk to the upper trailhead would have been pretty long.

 

 

Pueblo, Golden, Fort Collins, & Home (Monday through Thursday)

 

We had decided to break the return trip into two parts, because of what happened a year ago when I drove up to Fort Collins. I got a blood clot that lodged in my kidney, and now half of one kidney is dead. My doctor says it was likely caused by sedentary living, and when I mentioned that I had just driven for two straight days before it happened, he thought that was likely why. (They don't really know what caused it, that's just kind of a best guess. Whatever indicators they can read to show the cause are uninformative to them.) So now, I try to stop every hour or so, get out of the car and walk around for a while. Sometimes the weather makes it unpleasant -- wind, rain, heat or cold -- but there's been no recurrence. That wasn't possible on the drive from Fort Collins to Ruidoso, because of scheduling issues (and I found that I could barely move my legs at all in the back seat, which is surprising in such a big vehicle, but there it is.) But on the return trip, we had time for a more relaxed pace, so we took the opportunity to visit a town we otherwise would never spend time in.

 

fire west of Pueblo

The main attraction, if you can call it that, was the series of wildfires in New Mexico and Colorado. There was one southwest of Santa Fe as we left; another west of Taos as we passed through there, and a big one just west of Pueblo, which had us pretty concerned for a while. We kept an eye on that one the whole time we were there.

 

Nancy goes sometimes to a dog show in Pueblo, so she knows of some interesting places in the town. She pointed out the bridges across the Arkansas River in the town. Each ethnic neighbourhood had its own bridge to allow the workers to get across to their jobs at the big steel plant. Some have been replaced now by road bridges, but a few pedestrian bridge crossings of the river still remain. 

 

Ethnic neighbourhoods used to be the rule all across America; that's how we ended up with Chinatowns and Koreatown and Little Italy, even though now most of the people living in those neighbourhoods aren't Chinese or Korean or Italian. But the names have stuck. And like in those neighbourhoods, the shops that are there have often been there for a hundred years, and reflect the original ethnicity of the place. Thus in one neighbourhood of Pueblo, there's a place called Dutch Lunch. (It's probably German, like Pennsylvania Dutch is German.) And Nancy took us to an Italian market called Gag's (short for, I think, Gagliardo's). It reminded me strongly of the old Central Grocery on Decatur Street in New Orleans, that I used to go to with my mother: the prosciutto and salami hanging over the deli, the elaborate selections of olive oils and bottled garlic; all kinds of pastas. All kinds of kitchen gadgets. All kinds of unidentifiable products imported from the Old Country. It took me back. But I knew I wouldn't be able to get the things I most wanted back home in good condition: after three days in the car, I wouldn't trust any of those things to still be good. So I took my trip down memory lane, and left with only the reminiscences and a container of pizelli ... which didn't last a day anyway.

 

cool sculpture at PCC

We also went down to the convention center in town, where there was an exhibit about the four local men who hold the Congressional Medal of Honor. There were statues of them outside the building, and a short film explaining their histories was shown on a screen in the hallway. Always moving stories, tales that you have to get a little choked up on hearing. 

 

The last thing we saw in town was an old railroad locomotive turntable. It's right next to the river, and we saw it as we passed over on the Main Street Bridge. I had Nancy go back, after the convention center, so I could take pictures, because I've only ever seen them on TV and in movies, despite having heard about them all my life. I think they're kind of cool, and I wanted a picture. 

 

The next morning the wind had shifted and the smoke from the local wildfire was heading well to our south, so the drive up to Golden to get Carly back was much less concerning than it would have been otherwise. We had lunch with the Zimms; Kaylie was back from Scout Camp, but Jeramy wasn't home; at work, I suppose. Ali was at work, too, but she often works from home and so was able to take some time out to feed us (and her kids, who would probably have had to eat anyway, even if we hadn't shown up) a nice smorgasbord of sandwich-style options for lunch. 

 

The drive from Golden to Fort Collins was uneventful, as was the drive home from there. If anything out of the usual happened, it wasn't unusual enough to leave any trace in my memory. Glad of that!