Tuesday, July 26, 2005
We seem to have lost our camera cord, so we will be posting the rest of our photos when we get home and can get a new cord!
Denver was a brief but wonderful stop on our trip back East. We stayed with friends Bret and Sarah who hosted a wine tasting at their home the night we arrived. Their home is an adorable 1950 s ranch style house near the cherry creek area of Denver. They have done a great job decorating and as we are soon to be in our new house it was fun to see their before an after photos and think about how the colors they chose would look in our new place. The wine tasting was a blast. We tasted a Rose, a Sauvignon Blanc and a Pinot Noir and three courses of fondue. We completely overdid it on both fondue and wine which made our Saturday in Denver rather slow moving. We went to a late breakfast and then hung out and caught a late movie – Willy Wonka at the IMAX Theater…our first movie in two months.
The only thing we really didn’t love about Denver was the challenge of driving around Denver and finding our way. The traffic lights are super long there, and the streets very wide boulevards. This makes for massive traffic and congestion. It isn’t exactly an easy place for an outsider to figure out. But the skies were blue and the mountains surrounding the area are really incredible and the company was great.
So we left Denver on Sunday and made our way South to Taos, New Mexico taking a smaller highway to get there. Between Denver and Taos, the landscape really changed dramatically. We started to see the Sangre de Christo mountains which are red and beautifully different than the Rockies. The sky was cloudy in a really magnificent and dramatic way the whole drive South. When we arrived in Taos, we checked in to the Taos Bed & Breakfast, which is an Inn my family has been visiting for many years, and then we headed out for food and arrived in town just in time for the finale of the Fiestas de Taos, which included a massive crowd and music and lots of partying in the town square. Everyone looked like they were having a great time so we figured we should get caught up and so we went over to the Taos Inn and had a few Margaritas and watched a terrific Latin guitar trio.
Taos is a neat town. Mike commented on how amazing it is that the Spanish/ Mexican influence still seems to be so strong and untouched here. The place feels like the west, but not the “wild west” – instead it feels like an old Mexican village in many ways and there is a mixture of both English and Spanish language used here. Everything is small scale, and almost all the building are adobe. Adding to the cultural feel is the closeness of Taos Pueblo which is just outside of the main street, and which is still inhabited by Pueblo Indians who live in the traditional way of their ancestors. Taos families have been here for generations upon generations and then there are zillions of artists who also reside here. Georgia O’Keefe often came to Taos valley to paint and work. Mike thought it was so interesting that they are still building in the vernacular style instead of switching to the standard tract housing that seems to have taken over the rest of America. The new architecture and the new housing developments are not the standard Toll brothers stuff we have seen everywhere else. Instead it is almost all adobe housing here, with traditional details and ornately carved doors and posts. There are also lots of “off the grid” earthships, straw bale houses and rammed earth houses. This is a funky community of artists, old timers, skiers and it is just neat. Everyone should visit Taos at least once.
So after some hiking, exploring, sight seeing and a fabulous dinner at Lamberts, we will leave Taos today and head East again. For the ride home, we bought the new Harry Potter book on CD. Its 19 hours and we are 4 hours in, trying to savor it and stretch it out for the long stretches of road between Taos and Philadelphia. So far, it is very captivating! We plan to make three more stops…Kansas, Missouri and West Virginia, and then we hope to return to Philadelphia by the weekend.
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