For whatever reason, Santa Fe, Ne Mexico, was a place we wanted to visit. Especially me. I don’t really know why. Everything I ever heard of the place made it seem cool. It was far different than we expected in both good and bad ways. We definitely weren’t disappointed we visited, unlike a few other places. We had four days of fun in “The City Different”.
I expected Santa Fe to be bigger, grander. I knew that life revolved around the plaza. And that it is an old city. I guess I expected a European city in a southwest setting. Big buildings, wide but winding streets, and lots of great shops.
The streets were definitely winding. Most of them are very narrow, just wide enough for one-way traffic. The buildings were very southwest – all tan adobe, and most 1-2 stories tall. Beautiful, but not what we expected.
Anyhow, we did our best to hit the highlights in our short time there. We walked the Plaza. We wandered the winding roads and art galleries. We walked down Canyon Road and took in those great galleries. And we ate like New Mexican kings!
It’s amazing that despite the average art piece being $4,000-ish and many being $40,000+ how welcoming galleries are. Here we are, two young-ish adults in t-shirts with two small kids and nowhere were we treated like we didn’t belong. Only one gallery even overtly tried to sell us art. The rest just made small talk and welcomed us to look around. It was great!
We also spent some time searching for treasure. A former gallery owner named Forrest Fenn hid treasure somewhere in the Rocky Mountains back in 2009-2010. After selling his gallery in 1988, he found out he had a 20% chance of surviving from cancer. He decided to put together a chest full of treasure and die on top of it in the mountains, rather than in a hospital bed. Well, he ended up surviving cancer. As he approached his 80th birthday in 2009-2010, he decided to go hide the treasure anyhow. He also wrote a poem with clues to its location. As of today, nobody has found it. I was pretty sure it’s close to Santa Fe, so we looked at a few places that I thought fit the clues. We didn’t find treasure, but had a great walk out in the forrested mountains.
Again, Santa Fe was a great place to visit. Despite it being far different from our expectations, it was definitely fun. We appreciate the small, friendly setting of “The City Different” and will definitely return someday.
