New Mexico, Santa Fe: One Day We'll Return

Having visited the Route 66 Casino outside Albuquerque for a couple of hours, and then having stopped in Albuquerque itself to have a very late meal of Sonic and McDonald's, we ended up getting to Santa Fe late in the evening, after midnight. Trying to find a motel that was within our budget at that time was next to impossible; our search ended up taking 45 minutes before we managed to settle on a room at America's Best Value Inn, actually one of the first places that we checked when we arrived in town, before driving over 3 miles along the main road of town in search of a better deal.

The rate at America's Best Value Inn was expensive, but they offered free wireless internet access and complimentary breakfast (which we subsequently ended up missing). The place was more expensive than many other motels we saw, but those other places were a bit grungy and too scary late at night. The annual Native American Indian Arts and Crafts Fair was being held in Santa Fe during the weekend that we had arrived, the busiest weekend of the year. This meant that some of the cheaper motels, like Motel 6 and Super 8, had more than doubled their rates for the weekend to over $200 (around £100) per night for a room!

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi was an impressive stone structure, the first of many amazing buildings we encountered

Morning came quickly with it being so late when we finally settled into a room. We skipped breakfast and waited until lunch to eat - ham and cheese tortilla wraps with mustard, which we had made from food that we had bought from a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Albuquerque. The wraps were quite tasty and curbed our hunger, despite missing breakfast, and we decided that iced teas were in order to wash the residual crumbs down nicely.

A small cafe was next door to our motel so we went there after checking out to buy a couple of drinks and use their free wireless internet connection. We were going to stay for a couple of hours but decided to leave almost immediately because the sun was blaring through the large windows in the cafe, causing the inside temperature to escalate tremendously. It was not even noon and we had started to sweat, inside a building, so we decided that a Starbucks with air conditioning would be a much safer environment for us and anyone near our armpits.

After we spent a couple of hours at Starbucks, where we drank iced coffees instead of iced teas, we set out on our mission of the day, which was to see as much of downtown Santa Fe as possible, knowing that the task wouldn't present much of a problem since New Mexico's capital city was very small. When we arrived downtown, we tried to find parking as close to the city centre as possible, so we could investigate the area without having a long commute from our rental SUV. Fortunately, we came across a boy scout who was standing at the side of the road, encouraging drivers to use the car park he and his mother was manning for the day.

The cost to park was $10 (around £5) for the whole day, which was a bit steep for our daily budget, but a worthwhile expense since the fee was going towards a charity that his group of fellow scouts was sponsoring. Plus, we thought that many of the other car parks would be full, with it being the busiest weekend of the year. We won't tell you how we felt when we passed a nearly empty public parking lot a few minutes closer to the city centre, which would have been free of charge. As we said, at least the money for the boy scout's lot went to a good cause...

Walking towards the main plaza in downtown Santa Fe was pleasant; neither of us had expected to see such a concentration of beautiful adobe buildings. They oozed character and charm and we had a lot of fun looking inside many of the shops and staring through the restaurant windows, admiring the food. Seeing all of the restaurants in Santa Fe was the primary driver behind the title for this journal entry; we both would like to return to Santa Fe for a week and have a major foodfest, trying a different restaurant for every meal.

Besides food and souvenir shopping, the main church in the city was also worth noting. Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi was an impressive stone structure, the first of many amazing buildings we encountered when walking around the city centre. We also checked out the state capitol, which was much different in design compared to other state capitols we have seen throughout our journey around the States this summer. The structure had a circular shape but its overall design was lacking a dome on top of a large rectangular building.

The majority of the beautiful buildings that we passed during our walking tour through the city centre were adobe and perfectly maintained. We were walking around the city late on a Friday afternoon and we could see everyone setting up their stalls for the large Indian fair that was due to start the next day. It was a shame that we missed the excitement and bustle of the fair that weekend, but we had to continue travelling north as we made our way towards southwestern Colorado.

For dinner that evening, we had planned to eat southwestern food at a well-known and very popular restaurant called The Shed, a recommendation given to us by Kyle's friend, Lindsay, in Austin. We had called earlier in the day to see if there were any tables available that night and the place was fully booked. However, we were told by the hostess that we didn't need to make a reservation if we arrived when the restaurant opened at 5:30pm. When 5:30pm came, we had just finished our walking tour, so we headed to The Shed. We were looking forward to a good meal after spending the afternoon walking along the streets of Santa Fe.

The decor inside The Shed had a true southwestern flair to it. We walked through a brightly painted and decorated archway and came to a small courtyard with several small tables that were surrounded by foliage, a very beautiful setting. We walked over to the hostess to get a table, telling her that we were starving. At that point, we had started getting concerned due to the number of people who were already waiting in the courtyard, nonetheless already sitting at the tables outside.

Inside The Shed, all of the stools around the bar were occupied and we were told that there would be an hour wait for a table. As you can imagine, we weren't happy to hear that, considering that we were told we would have no problems getting a table when we phoned them earlier. After being told that we could order food at the bar without waiting for a table, we kindly informed the hostess that we would sit in the bar area until two bar stools there were free.

Once we were seated, a waitress asked if we wanted to order a couple of drinks whilst waiting for the bar seats to free up. We ordered a couple of soft drinks, at which she expressed slight disappointment, expecting us to order alcoholic drinks, leading to a higher bill at the end of our dining experience and thus a higher tip. She asked us if we wanted some tortilla chips, salsa and guacamole while we were waiting; we jumped at that offer and were eager to receive the snack since we were famished. What we didn't expect was that we would have to pay for them...

The tortilla chips, guacamole, salsa and two soft drinks ended up costing us $15 (around £7.50). We ended up leaving the restaurant after we finished eating the food and drinking our drinks because of a mishap with our seats at the bar. Our waitress told us when two spots were available at the bar, she would save them for us so we could order dinner there, but as soon as two seats were vacated, a couple of loud, obnoxious and pushy American men decided to plant themselves down into them before we could, as soon as they had walked in the restaurant.

Neither of us was up for a confrontation that day, so we just politely told our waitress that our seats were taken. She was pretty useless and wasn't in the mood for any kind of verbal battle, so we decided to leave the restaurant. The waitress still didn't seemed very bothered when we left, but she did halfheartedly apologise for the inconvenience. We'll have to give The Shed another try when we return to Santa Fe one day, but we'll (a) make a reservation and (b) try to be a little more pushy ourselves if that is what it takes to eat there. Even though the meal was not a complete success, we did leave the restaurant with full bellies and we enjoyed sitting there for almost an hour, soaking up the atmosphere and admiring the artistic decor inside.

Just as we were leaving the restaurant, it started pouring down with rain, so we ran back to the parking lot where our car was parked. We were wet when we got in the car and happy to be leaving to go to Taos. The journey there was supposed to take us past the outdoor Santa Fe Opera, but we missed the turning to the place due to the heavy rain. We actually got lost leaving Santa Fe's city centre, but somehow found ourselves driving on the correct highway out of town, with road signs pointing to both Santa Fe Opera and Taos.

After driving north for 20 minutes, we realised that we passed the opera and agreed that it didn't matter since it was so wet outside; we would have been soaked trying to take photos of an outdoor opera house and stage. Plus it was after 6:00pm and the lighting was really bad. You can't tell us that you would want us to put bad photos on our journal, would you? Getting to Taos, we wanted to drive along "The High Road", as it was called in the Lonely Planet Southwest USA travel guide, but we got lost twice in the process of finding it. You should click to the next journal entry to find out more about this.