Four Days in Santa Fe

Beautiful scenery, wintry weather, outstanding skiing, amazing cultural heritage, and great food are some of the memories I will take with me as I narrow down my list of places to live after leaving the Army. I'll also remember some bad Mexican food and a downtown plaza torn up for construction, making navigation very difficult.

Quick Tips:

Best Way To Get Around:

The heart of downtown is very navigable on foot, with much to see in the way of museums, galleries, cultural centers, and historic churches. If you're wanting to get out from the center a bit more, biking is very much an accepted practice here, with bike lanes on all the major streets. However, the weather may be prohibitive (in the teens and twenties during the winter days), so you may opt for a car. Haven't noticed too much in the way of taxis, although there seems to be a fairly significant number of buses around...

The Pink Adobe has been a fixture in Santa Fe lore for many decades now, and understandably so. Its clientele has included heads of state and movie stars, whose pictures are hung on the walls of the entry foyer. Once inside the restaurant, which is a converted 300-year-old adobe residence (hence the name), the ambiance is created by candlelit tables and fireside chairs.

The wine list is extensive, in contrast to the menu, which focuses on a few dishes that they do extremely well. The Steak Dunigan is their signature--a New York Strip topped with sauteed mushrooms and green chiles and served with a browned potato. Simply amazing. Appetizers include lobster cakes and cold artichokes, among others. Desserts are as amazing as the main courses--"The Pink" is famous for its apple pie.

This restaurant may be pricey, but it is well worth the cost for the food alone, not to mention the atmosphere and experience. The Pink Adobe's "Dragon Bar" has been voted one of the ten best bars in the country, and is a favorite hangout of locals and visitors alike.

Voted some of the best Mexican food in the country by Sunset Magazine, El Parasol doesn't disappoint. Serving take-out only allows more people to stop on their way to work in the morning and pick up a stuffed-to-bursting breakfast burrito filled with potatoes, eggs, and chorizo and covered in a red chile sauce (or green, if you prefer) for only $3.50. Lunch is even better, with beef or chicken tacos served with homemade salsa for only $1.50 a piece. If my wife had been accommodating, I would have eaten there every meal we had over our four days here. Outstanding.

The Blue Corn Cafe & Brewery is a great little restaurant and bar, perfect for a business lunch or unwinding after work. Being a brewery, it provides many options in the way of beers, both familiar and microbrews. The most interesting of the latter include a chocolate porter and a java-flavored stout. The food is great, with options for any appetite, including vegetarians. Most of the dishes have a Southwestern flavor to them, with liberal use of chiles and some garlic thrown in. If you're not a drinker, the prickly pear iced tea is good stuff.

Being only 15-20 miles outside of town makes this a very convenient trip. The road up is full of twists and turns, but it's well-maintained. It's plowed from 5am to 5pm every day and sanded liberally, so there is no buildup of snow, providing excellent traction. The slow going up the mountain provides amazing views of the surrounding area.

The resort itself is located over 10,000 feet above sea level, with the highest lifts reaching to around 12,000, allowing for even more great vistas and sunny skies. It is VERY cold, so be sure to bundle up. My wife and I got to the top at around 9:30 in the morning, half an hour after the resort opens, and it was a brisk 9 degrees, warming up to 12 by noon.

Four chairs, including a quad, service many runs, ranging the gamut from beginner to advanced. One thing I appreciated was the number and length of beginner runs, which is such a nice change from the typical one or two 1000 foot runs for the kiddies. Lift tickets are $45 for a full day, $33 for half days. Hours are from 9am till 4pm every day.

A beautiful cathedral with a rich history. The original church was built on the current grounds in the 1600s, with the present building being erected in the mid-1800s. Many former archbishops of the Santa Fe diocese are interred in the crypt under the cathedral. A unique baptismal font graces the center of the sanctuary, while vaulted ceilings and one-of-a-kind paintings of the stations of the cross add to the quiet reverence of this holy place. Masses are given daily, with confessions being heard on Saturdays.

Oh my goodness, I wanted to shoot myself. Everyone knows about train travel, or at least imagines they do. It's so romantic and quaint, a wonderful way to think about the days gone by. Well, let me tell you, you can skip this one if you want any of that. I looked this one up on the Internet prior to coming down here, in order to surprise my wife with a little tour up through the mountains to the little railroad-stop town of Lamy, NM.

Granted, I could have done some more research before booking, so it's partly my own fault. If I had looked, I would have realized that Lamy is only 12 miles from the train depot in Santa Fe. This is a four and a half hour tour. You do the math. This train moves slowly, people. Now, the scenery is nice, I will say that much. However, there are a few other things that aren't hyped on the website quite as much as the beautiful surroundings. Like, say, oh, the fact that Santa Fe Southern still carries freight cars to make some cash and they have to pick them up halfway through the ride. There goes 20-30 minutes of jockeying around to pick up the cars.

Then you get to Lamy and there's absolutely nothing there other than the Amtrak station, which has a Coke machine. The website says to pack a picnic, but doesn't say why. Apparently, it's because there is nothing to eat for miles around, except for the ridiculously overpriced packages of M&Ms they sell on the train.

Then you have to wait in Lamy for an hour (ended up being closer to two for us) while they did something to the train, which seemed to us to be simply pulling back and forth on the track in front of the station for quite a long time and never actually succeeding in turning around, like they told us we were going to do. They did, however, make us all wait in the station (because it was about 18 degrees outside), which was crowded to the brink of exploding (did I mention there were about 25 pre-school kids on a field trip that day with us?) Oh, I forgot to mention that? Well, SFS forgot to tell us that, too. I like kids. Honest. However, I also like it when parents pay attention to their kids. That didn't happen.

Honestly, if my cell phone had gotten reception way up there in the mountains, I would have called a cab to go back to Santa Fe. I'll never take a train tour again.

First of all, this is a great little city. Only 70,000 or so in population, but seemingly much larger due to the influx of tourist bodies and dollars that happens year 'round. During the winter, there's skiing (boy, is there ever skiing) at quite a few resorts around town. Also, there's snowshoeing and cross-country skiing in the national forest above the city. Keep in mind that the city itself is at 7000 feet, so you'll get winded climbing a flight of stairs.

If you plan to do anything in the mountains around town, plan to spend a few days to acclimate. A great place to learn the lowdown on local winter sports is the Skier's Edge, a family-owned ski shop located at 1836 Cerrillos Road. They're extremely friendly and helpful. My wife rented a pair of skis from them and they took the time not only to set them up for her, but to show her how it was done, step by step. That way, if she needed any fine tuning on the hill, she would be able to make minor adjustments on her own.

We stayed at the Days Inn at 2900 Cerrillos, which was fine. We rolled in rather late on a Wednesday night and were pretty hungry, so we decided that we would grab a bite to eat at La Carreta, a Central American "restaurant" that's co-located with the hotel. Prices were cheap, I'll say that much. However, you get what you pay for.

My wife ordered a beef taco, and it came to our table with about three strips of beef in a tiny tortilla. That's it--not even so much as a lettuce leaf. I had ordered the chicken fajitas, and was dismayed when they came to our table. First of all, what do you think of when you order fajitas? I'm thinkin' chicken, onions, red and green sauteed bell peppers, maybe some salsa. You too, huh? Well, apparently at La Carreta they make their fajitas with frozen stir-fry vegetables. I'm not kidding--I got a plate full of zucchini and broccoli. Granted there were a couple red peppers in there. Now, on to the chicken. I was thinking as I ate that it tasted a little weird, then I realized what was strange--it was turkey. Not just any turkey, but the last of the turkey that's in the fridge four or five days after Thanksgiving and it's just about to go bad (c'mon, single guys, you know what I'm talking about). Oh, and they only gave me one tortilla. Now, it was folded into four sections, so it looked like more initially, but it was only one. So, the moral of the story is, if you stay at the Days, run across the street to McDonalds if you've got the late night munchies.

Other than that, there really wasn't too much bad stuff. You can read the review on the Santa Fe Southern Railways "excursion" if you want more gripes, but all in all, the good far outweighs the bad in Santa Fe.