No wows for Taos

As is usually our goal, we decided to take the High Road. And as is often the case, it was a bit more effort and somewhat painful at times but it was obviously the best and right choice. Naturally, I'm talking about how we got to Taos.

It was a squiggly line on the map that looked at least twice as long as the straight freeway between Santa Fe and Taos. But a local assured us it was a great road and a local magazine promised a quaint restaurant along the way. And so we turned right at Pojoaque and headed for the hills.

It was gorgeous. White and pink jagged rocks and cliffs dotted with green sagebrush and, as we got higher, bright green deciduous leaves and pine trees and meadows of soft grasses dancing in the breeze. The higher we got, the easier it was to understand the ancient volcanic eruptions that caused the landscape and the plateau that Los Alamos sits on.

The road twisted through tiny towns of double-wides and flaking adobes. Each had its own church with a cemetery next door. The cemeteries were unlike any I've seen. They were quite lively...an odd description for a collection of dead people. Although the tombstones were rather short, the cemeteries took up a lot of visual space and seemed at least 10 feet tall. Practically every tombstone was covered in colorful crosses and bright flowers and pinwheels and flags and stuffed animals. One had two life-sized metal silhouettes of a bright blue motorcycle protecting the shrine that enveloped a tombstone. Each cemetery looked like a party, friendly and celebratory but at the same time private and by invitation only.

We stopped for lunch at the promised quaint restaurant. It was indeed a lovely old home with a garden terrace and a menu of New Mexican cuisine. But, it was also a restaurant with a marketing campaign and an arrangement with tour operators, so the food was eh and the dining hall was later filled with older people wearing name-tags. My bright magenta prickly pear frozen lemonade, however, was worth the stop.

The twists and turns and bumpiness of the old asphalt took a toll on my already travel weary back so I was very much looking forward to a long walk around Taos. Again, eh.

Taos felt very transitory, in a sort of a just-passing-through, pit-stop sort of way. Its Plaza was filled mostly with souvenir shops offering key chains and t-shirts and ceramic Indian art made in China. There were a few restaurants and art galleries but none really drew us in. There were a few tourists wandering about but mostly it felt like the cars and motorcycles and bicycles were on their way to someplace else. Taos just didn't have the same cozy, inviting, historical, put-your-bags-down-and-stay-a-spell feeling that Santa Fe has. As a result, my walk wasn't nearly long enough.

We added another half-mile to my walk by driving about 6 miles out of town. We parked and walked to and fro across the big steel bridge built 45 years ago to span the Rio Grande Gorge. It was an impressive sight and the wind on the bridge was refreshing. At the center, the depth to the Rio Grande below was about 650 feet. As I stood there and looked both ways, I wondered how it might have been years ago, before roads and highway signs, to be galloping along on a horse through what looked like a long plateau and suddenly have to stop short on the edge of a cliff. Aside from one small stretch of rock slightly higher on one side of the river than the other, it was hard to know there was a deep gorge hidden in this countryside.

Electing not to pay the $10 per person entry fee...plus $6 per camera (including the one on my cell phone)...we skipped the historic Taos Pueblo and instead stopped at a modern one for free on our way back to Santa Fe. (A Pueblo is basically an Indian community. The one we stopped at had homes, a sopapilla restaurant, a grocery store, and a Wells Fargo bank.) We got back in time for dinner. The food here deserves its own entry. Stay tuned!