"It's only 40 miles away so we might as well take a detour"

Further to my last post in which I kept you all enraptured with my geekiness, I thought I would explain that we do know where we are sleeping each night (and most stops are more than one night) but we tend to decide en route any activities on the day we do them or sometimes the night before. The 500+ mile stints have caused us to lose a bit of perspective on distances, though. Somewhere that we have just read about in a pamphlet or been recommended by a local is suddenly "just down the road" when it is less than 50 miles away. Sometimes it has worked out:

Chimayo

This little place in New Mexico is apparently the "Lourdes of America". Chimayo has holy dirt which you rub on places that hurt and it gets fixed.  Not sure how I feel about charging $2 for holy water or $3.50 for holy dirt but I'm sure the chapel needed a new roof or something. It was very nice little place though. Very relaxing and on holy days they do reenactments which look very good if you are into that sort of thing. So if you are in the area it's worth popping in.  G says the espresso there was terrible and the coffee shop owner tried to sell him a wood carving for $4500.

Four Corners Monument.

So there is one place in the USA where 4 states meet (for those not familiar with the US check out a map and all the straight borders between states): The Four Corners Monument:

C - "We'll pop over to Four Corners for dinner."
G - "Why are we going again?"
C- "Well we can be in four states at once, there is a thing on the ground"
G- "And this is a thing that people do, is it?"

Well it certainly was a thing. It is situated on Navajo land and is a monument on the ground.

I do think it is quite cool. But not $5 per person cool and we didn't get a dinner either (the overpriced indian fry bread trailer was closed). But we were in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado all at the same time (but although it is the recognised monument, it is apparently 2000 ft out according to official surveyors).

So sometimes the result of these 80 mile detours is that I have to be quiet for at least 10 minutes whilst G has his Grumpy McGrump Grump face on.
 
(We had Pizza and then he was happy again.) 

Santa Fe

So, on Saturday we made another 560 mile jaunt (all of these big drives have been 560 miles, give or take, which is just about the limit of my driving attention.  So thank you, cosmos) across some more desert to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It’s mildly cooler than Nevada -but then so is Venus- coming in at a balmy 28°C, but with enough humidity to not desiccate low-flying sparrows.

Hasn't quite lost it’s novelty yet, but we’re getting there

We’d heard quite a lot about Santa Fe with regards to it’s culture and food (certainly in comparison to the casino-polluted cultural vortex that is Nevada) and we were rather looking forward to having a gander. It is definitely a very individual place, as the buildings -new and old- follow the Spanish/Pueblo Indian style of architecture.  Broadly equivalent to the enforced mock-Tudor of Chester high street if it wasn’t shit. 

They don’t have a WH Smiths though. Your move, New Mexico

We caught the market in the Plaza, where there were a couple of hundred stalls selling every possible variation of carved Jesus and other local crafts.  You do realise something about yourself when you find yourself pondering the merits of a hand-carved $100 chopping board.  I reckon it might not’ve fit too well with our baggage allowance, though.  

All the wooden crucifixes in various degrees of horrific detail a man could ask for

Food-wise, they are all about the green chile around here.  I came here looking for a green chile cheeseburger and there is fearsome local competition among the local restaurants to produce the definitive example.   

Behold all ye mighty and despair

I managed to inadvertently eat green chile for three successive meals, including the above beast. I approve, and so does Gaviscon.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Santa Fe war heiß, aber erträglicher als Laughlin. Die Leute da kochten alles mit grünem Chiles. Das gefiel mir aber nicht so viel meinen Bauch.