{"id":1001,"date":"2017-07-07T03:04:56","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T03:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2017-07-07T03:51:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T03:51:04","slug":"thursday-july-6-2017-day-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/07\/07\/thursday-july-6-2017-day-17\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, July 6 2017 (Day 17)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We had a bit of a rough night because of worries about Mark’s dad, who had been transferred to assisted living yesterday, but was taken back to the hospital in the middle of the night, but eventually things calmed down and we did get some sleep.\u00a0 We then got up around 7:30, had a profoundly unexciting hotel breakfast, and took off for what we just only learned was “the Enchanted Circle,” a scenic drive around Wheeler Mountain’s base, about 84 miles all around, from Taos via various ski resort towns and hiking areas and back to Taos. We went about half-way around, until we were near Red River, since we did want to go for a hike, and I had picked out a promising one, Middle Fork Lake Trail, 4.3 miles, plus the hike to the trail head, a 1.2 mile dirt road that we thought the Prius might not manage.\u00a0 The trail had a lot of elevation gain (over 1,200 feet) but with many switchbacks, so that worked well for us.\u00a0 About half-way to the top, there was a lovely waterfall and we had to cross the stream on rocks and tree trunks, and the Middle Fork Lake at the top was a beautiful, clear little mountain lake.\u00a0 We had pines and aspens shade the trail almost the whole time, so even though we walked for three + hours total, we never got blazingly hot.<\/div>\n
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After the hike, we drove to the center of Red River and used their picnic facilities for our lunch, and finished our drive around the Enchanted Circle.\u00a0 It was unfortunately not so very enchanting that after Red River and before the next little town, there was a hideous superfund site, strip mining for something called molybdenum that basically turned an entire mountainside into tailings.\u00a0 Reading up on it on line at the EPA site made it even more depressing to contemplate what people are willing to do to their natural environment in the name of profit.\u00a0 After that, the rest of the scenic drive was scenic again; unfortunately, we didn’t have time to stop at D.H. Lawrence’s ranch in nearby San Cristobal (we saw the sign for it, but I knew it would close at 2 pm and it was 1:50 at that time).\u00a0 It’s always weird to me to imagine that Lawrence spend time in the southwest and hung out with O’Keefe etc., especially since I saw his birth house in Nottingham years and years ago (in my teens).<\/div>\n
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Once we got back to Taos, we parked near the courthouse and checked out most of the historic district–the Taos plaza and the street with several museums on it.\u00a0 I love the look of the adobe houses, but the place is simultaneously overrun with tourists and knick knack shops AND rundown with a lot of closed shops in the side streets etc.\u00a0 I also find it frustrating that I cannot easily tell old, historic adobe buildings and modern imitations, since the style is so uniform.\u00a0 And I have to admit that I simply do not know a whole lot about the art of the Southwest (only about O’Keefe), so I am not sure what I am seeing or who the artists are that keep being mentioned in connection with Taos.\u00a0 So the walk around was a bit perfunctory, and the through traffic is annoying enough that I was glad when we left.<\/div>\n
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It’s about 1 hour 30 minutes from Taos to Santa Fe, and I have to say that the landscape between the two is fascinating.\u00a0 The Rio Grande and its canyon walls accompanied us for a good portion of the drive, and the canyons and sandstone formations, mixed with the green sagebrush and shrubs, is really beautiful.\u00a0 The nearby buildings, especially on top of cliffs, blend in really well because of the sandstone-colored adobe, and in the distance, the mountains with a bit of milky air to \u00a0blur the lines really DO look like they belong in a Georgia O’Keefe painting!\u00a0 On the way into Santa Fe, we picked up some groceries, and then found our way to the rental casita that we are sharing with our friends Randy and Laurie, who are here for a conference.\u00a0 They were already here; we have a nice space with bedrooms at opposite ends of the little adobe house (which we decided was probably once two houses, and someone built a connecting bit which is now the kitchen), a nice big dining room and an outdoor area with many places to sit and chat and eat–which is what we did after we unpacked our stuff.\u00a0 Laurie and Randy had ordered a platter of cheeses and cold cuts from a local store they knew about, and we had that with olives and baguette and–best of all–bread that Randy had baked earlier and brought from their home in Las Cruces. Since we have never spent time together outside of conference encounters and Facebook chats, we all had a lot of stories to tell and things to talk about, and we already gathered many many tips as to what to do in our 3 days here.\u00a0 We sat on the patio until about 9 pm, by which time it had cooled down a bit from the 90s earlier (important because no air conditioning!), and then got ourselves ready for bed.\u00a0 Excited for tomorrow!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  We had a bit of a rough night because of worries about Mark’s dad, who had been transferred to assisted living yesterday, but was taken back to the hospital in the middle of the night, but eventually things calmed down and we did get some sleep.\u00a0 We then got up around 7:30, had a … Continue reading “Thursday, July 6 2017 (Day 17)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer2017roadtrip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}