Today we woke up at 8:00 because we wanted to do a lot in Santa Fe. We checked out of our hotel, left the car and walked 10 minutes to a French bistro for breakfast. The old woman working there recommended the corned beef hash, which I had, along with fresh orange juice and coffee. Leia had a croissant sandwich but actually wanted fruit? The old woman kept coming by and placing her hand on my back to ask how everything was.
After breakfast we walked to the Georgia O’Keefe museum and stopped at galleries on the way. Georgia O’Keefe’s work was very impressive, featuring landscapes of New Mexico and plants from her travels. It was cool to see her looking for simplicity in nature through abstraction in her work. The museum made no mention at all of her most famous flower paintings from the 1920s, as though it was embarrassed of them, or salty that they didn’t have any, and so pretended those works never existed.
It was raining when we left the museum, and we strolled through Santa Fe Plaza to the Basilica in the rain. I noticed a bronze O’Keefe sculpture in the courtyard of another museum nearby. The Basilica had some decent stained glass and a large imposing baptismal fountain in the center.
We returned to our car and went to meet another ASAPPian Max for early lunch at Harry’s roadhouse, favored by Guy Fieri. It was crowded but we only waited a few minutes. Guy had a buffalo burger and Leia had half a grilled cheese sandwich and shared a lemon meringue pie with Max.
Meow Wolf was our next stop and a key destination for this trip, where we spent over 3 hours exploring and trying to unravel the story. The building looks like nothing special from the outside. Inside it was very engaging: like a haunted house that opened into other dimensions. The wild creativity was apparent. There was a hidden mystery to uncover, involving a child stuck between dimensions after trying to emulate his grandpa who brought the family hamster back to life. There was an secretive organization hunting his uncle - who was a cult leader selling vacations to worlds he had created by joining parts of distant planets together through portals - and the organization turned out to be aliens tracing their history possibly back to the Big Bang, in conflict with a force of creative chaos that gave the family - and possibly all humans - their powers. The other worlds could be accessed through passages hidden in the house: the closets, the fridge, and the washing machine for example. There were instruments you could play, like a laser harp, strummed by obstructing the beams. Much of this was similar in style to the Meow Wolf in Denver, yet also unique. Some of the areas came from the imaginations of the family: there was a room where everything looked made of candy - with eyes, and another room that was all black and white and populated by creepy retro cartoon characters. There was one long hallway of neon trees that looked like the inside of an aquarium. There was a bus standing up vertically, placed there by the father’s laser harp. I decided not to try to climb up to the driver’s seat, because I don’t have any insurance to repair whatever damage I do to myself.
I was hungry by the time we left so we had our first dinner at Jambo Cafe, which served good African food nearby. I had Kenyan beef kebabs and Leia a combo plate of three stews: goat, lamb, and Berber chickpea. Leia says it was spicy. We stopped for a brief second dinner of excellent green chili at El Farolito, the one restaurant in Bo’s village, surprised to find it still open at 8pm. Leia says it was spicy.
We watched a little TV with Bo and his wife and their excited dogs before bedtime. They had prepared chicken soup, but I had no room left for third dinner.
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