Trip Report - Santa Fe and Taos with Road Scholar

My traveling companion and I recently returned from a week in Santa Fe and Taos, NM with the Road Scholar organization (a great nonprofit which organizes travel with an educational component, mostly for older adults although all ages over 21 are welcome.)  While we were there we had the opportunity to try several  restaurants reviewed on Roadfood, and since I've enjoyed so much reading other people's trip reports, I thought I'd give one a try.  This is my first attempt at posting photos, so let's see if it works!
 
We arrived at the Albuquerque Sunport on Sunday, July 11 and took the shuttle to our hotel in Santa Fe, which was on the Cerrillos Road commercial strip, not in the fancier (and more expensive!) downtown area.  Neither my companion or I had ever been to the southwest before, and we were very excited to experience the differences in landscape from our flat, eastcoast home in Delaware.
 
The first thing we noticed was lots of the color brown....very few trees except where planted and watered deliberately.  Lots of scrubby bushes and sagebrush.  But what was most noticeable was the sky.  It seemed bigger, and closer, and more dramatic than back east. 

 
  
 We had arrived at about 2 PM mountain time, which was 4 PM as far as our eastern appetites were telling us, and we needed lunch!  The hotel staff recommended a small Mexican restaurant a few doors up the street, with the comment. "The little hole-in-the-wall ones are the best."  A short walk later we were at Adelitas.  This tiny, family-run restaurant had great food, and the festive atmosphere was added to by the finale of the World Cup on the TVs in either corner of the room.  Most of the kitchen staff were in the dining room, loudly cheering for Spain (they won later, after we left.)
 
Here is my companion's cheese enchilada plate (you can tell this is a Mexican, as opposed to a NEW Mexican, restaurant, by the mashed refried beans - New Mexican cuisine keeps them whole.)  We were asked the classic New Mexico question "Red or green chile?" though. This plate has red chile, and my carne advoda (pork stewed until falling-apart tender in red chile) burrito had "Christmas" - half red and half green.  Unfortunately I forgot about taking pictures and scarfed it up before remembering.  It was just fiery enough that I needed my iced tea near at hand, but quite delicious and exactly what I needed at the moment.  
 

 
After several different versions of cheese enchiladas on the trip, my companion pronounced Adelitas the best.
 
On Tuesday, we took a trip up to the Sangre de Christo mountains to the village of Chimayo', which has a famous small church known as the "Lourdes of New Mexico".  Supposedly the dirt there has healing properties.  While we did not try it out, the church itself was beautiful, with lovely garden planting and the mountains looming in the background.
 

 
On the grounds was a small, well-worn store which sold religious artifacts (and, apparently, popsicles.)  It reminded me of so many pictures of small grocery stores in the Deep South, complete with ancient gas pump (on the left.)  But what made it uniquely New Mexican was the decoration with "ristras" (strings of dried red chiles), which you can see on the upper right of the building, next to the name of the store.
 

We had dinner that night at the hacienda Rancho de Chimayo' restaurant, arranged as part of our tour.  The hacienda was in a park-like setting, and decorated with the obligatory ristras.
 

 
We began with frozen margaritas, and chips and salsa.  The salsa was quite hot, and outlasted my margarita, which was the most pleasurable  means of quelling the fire that I've yet tried.  I had the combination plate, a pork tamale, cheese enchilada, and beef taco, with pinto beans and rice.  Once again, I forgot all about taking pictures, but my companion did snap a picture of her enchilada plate, with sopapilla (to  the left, with a small bite out of it.)
 

 
Most of the food was just average, though the setting was lovely.  But oh, those sopapillas.  Soft, and warm from the fry kettle (but not the least bit greasy), and hollow inside, you bite or tear off one corner and drizzle honey inside.  They were my single favorite newfood item that I tried on this trip.  Bigger and better ones to come!
 
One of the most enjoyable parts of the trip was seeing the landscape of the Western movies and TV shows of my childhood (ok, I'm dating myself) come to life.  I almost could not believe some of the things I saw were real outside the silver screen.  Here is a mesa, which, as our guide explained, is a flat-topped mountain that is wider than it is tall  (as opposed to a butte, which is taller than it is wide.  Can you tell I'm a schoolmarm?)
 

 
Much of our time was taken up by the activities of the tour, but from time to time we did sneak away on our own.  I had picked out several restaurants from the Roadfood reviews that I wanted to try.  The first was the Plaza cafe, where we went for lunch on a rare free afternoon.  The first thing I ordered was more of those sopapillas.
 

 
These were even better than the ones at Rancho de Chimayo'!  They must be popular here, because every table had its squeeze bottle of honey.  I also had the New Mexican chopped salad, with lettuce, corn, green chiles, apples, and strips of fried corn tortilla, but alas! not the promised pine nuts.  It was huge and, stuffed with sopapillas, I could not finish it.  My companion had (you guessed it) the cheese enchiladas, which she pronounced "frozen Old El Paso."  Oh well, at least the sopapillas were great, and the decor was worth the trip.  Here's the clock:
 

 
And a pretty comprehensive list of useful phone numbers, including one for President Obama.
 

 
We got a chance to visit Museum Hill, but as time was short we only got to see one of them, the magnificent Museum of International Folk Art.  It was a very hot day (high 90s) but comfortable nonetheless because of the lack of humidity.  I did enjoy sitting outside for a time and feeling the clarity of the air and intensity of the sunlight.
 
One of the other museums which, alas, we did not have time for, was the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the entrance of which
featured this great statue of an Apache warrior:
 

 
The landscaping featured this fine specimen of a cactus:
 

 
Here's the monument to the end of the Santa Fe trail, which went from St. Louis to Santa Fe and supplied the whole southwest with goods from the eastern parts:
 

 
More to come!  
 

Nice report! Looking forward to seeing the rest of your trip. There is so much to see and do around Santa Fe!

Marvelous photos and especially timely restaurant reviews. loved the photo of the grocery store with the chiles.

This report is off to a great start! 

I had to chuckle about the "Brown countryside" comment.

The first time Janet came East with me (1994) It was her first ride east of the (Colorado) River. As we crossed the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahome the landscape slowly turned from Desert Earth-tones to Green Pasture land, and then in Eastern Oklahoma actual forests of trees appeared. She was amazed at  how 'different' the surrounding were....green vs the brown of our desert Home in SoCal!!

Your comment about the reverse color impact struck a memory chord for me, Thanks!

Your report  was so much fun to read..............I never knew what Christmas was  until I read about one of the meal descriptions.  I then saw it was on the new poll  as a chice.

mayor al


I had to chuckle about the "Brown countryside" comment.

Your comment about the reverse color impact struck a memory chord for me, Thanks!

I have a friend who grew up in Chimayo NM and never traveled until he was 24 or so. He came to visit me here in the very fertile and lush Fox River Valley and could not get over the green! I always felt the difference too if I spend more than a few weeks visiting him in Santa Fe, it is striking. But as green as it is here, nothing beats that blue blue NM sky!

Kland,
Sheesch, You did it too!!!  The night sky here in the East is seldom totally clear and not distorted by the ambient light from Street lights or city reflection.  Even in the urbanized desert community where we lived in SoCal the brilliance of the night sky was amazing.

However, One night, when we had left Edwards AFB about Mid-Night,  Jan and I walked in the desert night...no ambient light anywhere, and no moon. I swear you could read by the starlight. The clarity of the night sky out West is so beautiful!!!

This  report has done wonders at bringing back a lot of good memories for me. I did a summer trip to the Philmont Scout Reservation in that part of N M / CO back in the late 50's. It is a beautiful part of the USA.

LOve the Southwest...thanks for reviving the memories....great report....oooohhh that food!!!!

Wow, that food looks good. I really need to do a tour out there.

Thursday morning we decided we were going to go on a little adventure apart from our tour group, and set out at 6:45 AM to skip the hotel breakfast and go to Tecolote Cafe, which we had read about on Roadfood and sounded too good to miss.  One of our "classmates" happened upon us as we were sidling out of the hotel lobby like two schoolgirls playing truant, and told us later it seemed like we were "on a mission."
 
That we were.  We had been trying to figure out where it was ever since we arrived, finally getting some help from a city bus driver, who pointed it out to us on our way back from the plaza on Wednesday afternoon.  By the way, the city buses in Santa Fe are a dream -- clean, on time, friendly drivers, run on clean natural gas so they are not polluting.  And they have bike racks on the front.  More than once in the several times we used the bus, the bus would stop for a bike rider who would load his bike onto the front of the bus, ride for a while, then get off and cycle away!  Anyway, the bus driver told us that Tecolote was the best place in Santa Fe for breakfast, and that indeed that things got better as you got away from the tourist areas. And so our plans were confirmed.  We had a class at 8:30 and wanted to be back in time.  We had been warned that it could get crowded on weekends and after 8 AM even on weekdays, so we went early, and were rewarded with a lively but mostly empty restaurant.
 
Tecolote is on a boring commercial strip outside of the downtown tourist area, next to a somewhat sinister looking tattoo parlour called something like "The Dungeon."  This strip is mostly noted by some rather comical attempts by chain retailers to follow the "all-adobe" building code instituted by the city fathers in 1957.  You just haven't live till you've seen an "adobe" (or what the locals call faux-dobe -- stucco with brown paint) Burger King, or Wal-Mart.  However, our place was white stucco with an abstract mural of an owl ("tecolote" means"owl" in Aztec.)
 
The service was friendly and attentive, but not in your face, and the decor was funky and not too upscale.  We had seen some of the possibilities on the Roadfood website, and I decided to try the Sheepherder's Breakfast -- new potatoes, jalapenos, and onions topped with green and red chile, cheese, and in my case two over easy eggs.
 
 
This was fantastic - the soft egg yolks combined with the fiery-but-not-too fiery chile and soothing cheese beautifully.  I ended up eating it with a spoon so as to get some of the chile in every bite.
 
My companion opted for the Santa Fe omelet - cheddar and green chiles - with the house's thin and crispy home fries. 
 

 
She pronounced both delicious, but reserved her highest praise for the jalapeno bacon:
 

 
which she says has now spoiled her taste for regular bacon.  I had a bit and could definitely taste the jalapeno.
 
Both breakfasts came with a bakery basket.  Unfortunately, in our greed we devoured two fabulous cheddar-jalapeno muffins and a biscuit before we remembered to take a picture.  The muffins were some of the best I've ever had.  Perfect in texture, firm, moist, and a bit coarse-crumbed, unlike the cheap cupcakes disguised as muffins I've been served at (ahem)...let' s just say other places.  The biscuit was great as well, especially with the whipped real butter and strawberry preserves provided.  This was what was left when we finally remembered to take a picture.
 

 
We also had planned on trying the atole-pinon (blue corn and pine nut) pancakes, and were glad, given the other riches of the table, that we decided to order only one, to share.  It was the size of the plate, and came with more good butter and a small carafe of real maple syrup.
 

 
 
You can see that when we cut into it, it really was blue!  Also delicious -- one of the best pancakes I have ever had.  Both light and substantial, it was not too sweet, but blended perfectly with the butter and syrup.  Alas, we could not even finish it.
 

 
You can see one of the toasty pine nuts peeking out below.  I would have liked a few more (I LOVE pine nuts) but with everything else, that's not much of a complaint.
 
The walls were decorated with children's drawings of owls, and the overall feeling was of a friendly hometown cafe. 
 

 
However, don't be fooled, because this place's fame has spread.  On one wall is a map with the caption "Let Us Know Where You Are From".  It was stuck with hundreds of straight pins, marking places all over the United States.  I obtained a pin from our waitress, and stuck it in northern Delaware.  Looks like we were the first visitors from our small state, hooray!
 

 
Still more to come!
 

This is a really great Report...Please keep it coming.

Thanks for this report -- lots of fun.

I'm intrigued by the jalapeno bacon, seems like something that could be replicated at home. Did you get any insight into the process? Did they brine the bacon in jalapeno vinegar? Or were the jalapenos added when they cooked the bacon?

Thanks.

TJK

  Dear Sheepherder breakfast,
     You are beautiful & someday I will find you. 
                                   xoxo, Dawn  
  
   Your photos are wonderful, Tecolote should use them on their website. 

TJK - I'm not sure how the jalapeno bacon was created; they may have bought it that way. Maybe someone from New Mexico could tell us whether that's a well known item there or unique to Tecolote.  It had a strong taste of jalapeno, almost stronger than the bacon taste, and there were tiny bits of jalapeno on it.
 
AHI - The sheepherder breakfast was incredible, get there if and when you can!  Thanks for the compliment on the photos; the food was so good it was hard to take a bad picture of it. 
 
Mayor Al, thanks for your comments and encourgement.  I'm a LONGTIME reader on the Roadfood website but only an occasional poster, and I always enjoy hearing what you have to say.  It was so interesting to hear that people from the west are as surprised at the east's greenness as we are at their brownness.
 
Here we go with Part 3....
 
Thursday afternoons' museum visits also included a trip to the Georgia O'Keeffe museum.  Of course she is the area's most well known artist.  Most people know her by her flower paintings, but thanks to the lectures we received in the mornings, I was able to see that she's about much more than that.  The lecturer, an art historian and photographer, had taken photos of many of the locations she painted and then juxtaposed them with the paintings themselves.  This allowed a very interesting glimpse into her artistic process, and how she focused on details that spoke to her, radically simplifying the image and bringing out its beauty.  Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photographs in the museum, but if you like O'Keeffe's work it's a great place to visit.
 
Speaking of beauty, one of the most powerful impressions I got of Santa Fe is how important art and artists are here.  So much is consciously made colorful and beautiful!  Check out this parking sign:
 
 
 
Thursday evening we were given time for "dinner on your own" (most of the meals were included in the tour package, along with the hotel, lectures, and field trips.)  After consulting Roadfood, we decided to visit The Shed.
 
The Shed is entered through a pretty courtyard behind Susan's Christmas Shop.  We had earlier visited that shop because I like to buy Christmas tree ornaments as souvenirs of places I visit, and they had some nice ones -  we ended up buying five between the two of us.  Here's the entryway to The Shed:
 

 
I began with a frozen strawberry margarita, and my friend with a traditional lime one.  Here's the strawberry one (a little blurry, as I was later after two -- well, one and a half of these.)
 
 
 
 My appetizer was the cold raspberry soup, which was delicious.  However, due perhaps to the effects of the margarita (?) I could not get a clear picture of it.  It was creamy, fruity, and not too sweet, and I could have eaten much more of it.
 
My traveling companion ordered the veggie quesadilla:
 

 
This was OUTRAGEOUSLY good.  It was simple but so well made:  crispy flour tortillas, lots of creamy molten cheese, and bits of tomato, red onion, scallion, jalapeno, and cilantro.  My "can I try a bite" turned into several pleas for "just one more...."
 
For my main course I ordered the fish tacos:
 
 
They were good -- grilled mahi-mahi, purple cabbage, pineapple and mango salsa (not enough; I could hardly taste it) and soft flour tortillas, topped with a hefty chunk of perfectly ripe avocado.  The rice on the side was good, but nothing special.  I look forward to trying more fish tacos, though.
 
Companion ordered (no surprise) the cheese enchilada platter, which came with blue corn tortillas, pinto beans and posole (hominy stewed with pork.)  Her reaction to this plate was probably the same as yours will be to the picture of it....
 

 
Where's the enchiladas???
 
Ok, that's pinto beans in the upper left, and posole is the white chunky stuff from the middle to the bottom of the plate.  She ordered her chile "Christmas" style, and so you can see red chile on the left side of the plate and green chile on the right.
 
After digging around for a bit, the enchiladas were discovered buried under the other stuff.  She regretted not ordering the enchiladas by themselves instead of as part of the platter, but I had convinced her to get the platter so I could taste posole, which neither of us had ever had.  Too bad that neither of us ended up liking it -- it was bland and mealy.  I think they cooked it just fine; I just think neither one of us care for hominy (although I love grits, which is the stuff all ground up.)  Unfortunately, it seriously interfered with her enjoyment of the enchiladas.  
 
I also ordered the frozen mocha cake for dessert.  It was delicious but frozen quite hard, which forced me to chip off little bits at a time.  This actually was not a bad way to savor the dessert, although I'm not sure if that is what they had in mind.  Once again, no picture though (sorry.)
 
Wandering about the plaza area before our meal, we encountered this burro:
 
  
   
 This statue sits at one end of Burro Alley, which in the days of the Santa Fe trail was the street where travelers parked their burros whilst drinking and carousing.  Or so our guide told us.
 
The entire day Friday was taken up with a day trip to Taos, so no lectures in the morning.  We were on the bus bright and early.
 
As we went up further into the mountains the scenery became wilder and more spectacular.
 
We saw many arroyos, or dry stream/river beds, which we were told were sometimes used as roads by the locals.  This can be dangerous however, especially in "monsoon season" (July), when heavy thunderstorms can come up suddenly and turn them into raging torrents - every so often someone gets killed that way.
 
There were also some actual rivers and streams.
 

 
 In the morning we visited the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.  Millicent Rogers was a daughter of a wealthy family (connected somehow with Standard Oil, I think) who had a career as a model and actress and become a serious collector of southwestern art and folk art when she moved to Taos in the 1940s.  Her collection (well, about one tenth of it, that is) is housed in a small  jewel of a museum.  There are many treasures there, and  fortunately we were allowed to take photographs in the museum.  There was pottery, weaving, furniture, religious art, silver and turquoise jewelry, and paintings galore.  However, I'll give you a glimpse of just one breathtaking pieces, a turquoise necklace:
 

 
The stones are huge--the piece at the bottom is the size of my hand, fingers included!
 
There were many eccentric and artistic looking houses in Taos -- we took a picture of this pink one:
 

 
The fence of upright sticks to the left is called a "coyote fence", and we saw many of them in both Taos and Santa Fe.  They are an aesthetic statement, but supposedly also do work to keep out the coyotes.
 
In the afternoon, we had the privilege of visiting Taos Pueblo, which is the oldest surviving community of people in North America.  About 1,000 years old, it predates the Spanish conquistadors by hundreds of years (let alone the Pilgrims, who came along a hundred years after the Spanish.)
 
The multilevel adobe structure and single adobe dwelling house about 100 members of a tribe of about 3500, the rest of whom live off the reservation.  Those who live here have chosen to do so without electricity or running water, just as their ancestors did. 
 
 
Many of the dwellings had beehive-shaped ovens, or "hornos" beside them, which are used for baking.  A fire is built inside and left to heat the over and then die out.  Once the fire is out, bread and other items are put inside to bake.  The adobe bricks hold the heat for a long time.
 
It was very dry and dusty there -- a true desert landscape.  I was also struck by how many very quiet and mellow dogs were wandering about.  They seemed very peaceable and used to people.  One even let me scratch his ears, abeit with a resigned expression on his face ("Tourists......")
Here a couple of dogs seek shade next to one of the hornos.

 
The pueblo also featured a cafe:
  
Full from our box lunch, I did not partake, although I was tempted by the freshly made fry bread.
 
The residents did seem to have a good sense of humor about themselves as a tourist attraction:
 
 
 
So, to sum it all up:  New Mexico's license plate slogan is "Land of Enchantment".  I was certainly enchanted by it.  This was a memorable vacation.
I hope you have enjoyed hearing about it and will let me know how I did with my trip report.  I had fun writing it!
 
I will leave you with one more picture, of the incredible New Mexico sky as seen over Taos Pueblo:
 

 
 

Outstanding, keep the chapters coming.

All done!

Then I will be happy to award an 'A' for your efforts. Us retired educators are always happy to play teacher again!

I appreciate the reply. Will have to ask around.

TJK

Excellent - it's an area of the country I've not spent much time in, and unfortunately we have family commitments for the newest Roadfood tour announced. Someday ... and I'll come back to this trip report for ideas! Thanks for sharing your trip.

mayor al


Then I will be happy to award an 'A' for your efforts. Us retired educators are always happy to play teacher again!

Thanks, Mayor!

Emmymom--*awesome* pictures and writeup!  You're doing your schoolmarm roots proud--I now understand the difference between a mesa and a butte.  :)  It looks like you guys had some gorgeous food--now I want one of those blue corn & pinon pancakes.

Emmymom, having lived in the West for 30 years or so, it is easy to forget how stunning our scenery can be.
 Thanks for an awesome trip report full of wonder.

Fantastic trip report and pics    Have not had the opportunity to travel the southwest very much, but you have made me place it higher on my priority list, thanks for the great narrative to help us be able to travel along.

Great write up!  I've followed a similar route in the past, nice to relive it through your photos and descriptions.

Wonderful trip report! I enjoyed all the installments and the beautiful photos so much. Thank you, emmymom, for taking the time to record and post your interesting trip. Now I have to go look up Roads Scholar!

Thanks for the great report.  I was last out in SF in January (and got dumped on with snow) but can't wait to get back out there.  I've got a GCCB craving going on right now.

Great report--thanks for posting! I'm planning a cross-county trip next for next month and am still finalizing routes. I had not planned on visiting the area you described, but you made all aspects pretty appealing! I might have to reconsider...

How did I miss this the first time around?  What a fantastic trip report!  The photos are gorgeous and the food descriptions so detailed.  I am even willing to forgive you calling the food at Rancho de Chimayo average!  Aren't sopaipillas, hot from the oven, with a little honey drizzled on them, the best?
 
Please continue to do more trip reports for your future travels.

emmymom -

What a great report...this should get folks moving to the tour! 

You really captured it and hit it out of the park!

Looking forward to more reports!

Thanks for the kind words.  Buffetbuster, the sopapillas at Rancho de Chimayo' WERE great - but the ones at Plaza Cafe were even better!  They were SO good!

Wish I could join the tour, but school will be in session.   I'm going to have to go back sometime, though, because I never did get a green chile cheeseburger.....