Rattlers, books & Cerillos
Trip Start
Feb 12, 2011
1
19
27
Trip End
Mar 09, 2011
Where I stayed
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sunday, February 27, 2011
We payed for our parking by poking 3 one dollar bills into a tiny little slot in a big blue box. Our parking bay was #4 so the $ goes into the corresponding slot.
I wanted to hide behind a tree to wait for a Parking Inspector to come and check all the slots, but time marches on.....
Bought a few books by local authors and chatted with the elderly gent in the Treasure House Book & Gift shop; he'd run the shop for 35 years.
After wandering into a little plaza called Nick Garcia's Patio Shops we knew we'd found lunch; the original Garcia home is now The Quesadilla Grill downstairs; upstairs an art gallery.
Shaun, Nick's grandson served us the most amazing quesadilla's & best guacamole both of us had ever had (sorry Chris!) and is a great conversationalist.
After lunch we went to the Rattlesnake Museum. The reptiles themselves were lovely, but the the rest of the museum contained old snake-related artifacts and information about the mythology and use of snakes around the world. It was fascinating.
Viv gleefully purchased a Steve Irwin collectible doll in a box, and we chatted with Randy at the counter who is a Steve Irwin fan, although he likes Harry Butler more. More sensible.
Along the Turquoise Trail to Santa Fe we stopped at little towns called Madrid and Cerillos; Cerillos particularly is divine in a run-down, bare, just-getting-over-winter kind of way, Viv had been there before and wanted to show me the second-hand shop - barn, warehouse? - she'd been to that sells every old thing you could imagine. Unfortunately it was closed, but that was a good thing; just looking through the windows told me that you could easily spend the day browsing inside. My brothers & nephew Zach would never leave, you'd have to drug them and throw them over your shoulder to carry them out!
Oh, and by the way, it snowed while I was driving! Yes, actual flakes and I hadn't any chains or plows or anything!
Again a really pretty drive into Santa Fe and a We're Lost But Who Cares drive around the snowy back streets before finding the main drag again and deciding on the Santa Fe Motel & Inn for our 2 nights here. I love it already.
