Santa Fe

where we discover the beauty of Adobe architecture and are pleasantly surprised by New Mexico.

Waking up in our pitstop motel in Holbrook we had a four hour drive ahead of us to our next stop at Santa Fe. This part of the trip was a bit of a flat point for us as we only had sporadic attractions planned but it was a good chance to ease off on the sensory overload of the past few weeks and appreciate what we had seen so far on the trip. Nevertheless, we were pleasantly surprised with Santa Fe.

Arriving around lunch time, we checked into our motel for the night. The Silver Saddle is, unsurprisingly, a cowboy themed / arty motel and the exterior and interior live up this. This motel was highly rated online and in our Rough Guide as being a budget friendly but character filled place to lay your head for the night and coupled with being only a short drive into the centre of the town, it ticked all our boxes.

Shortly after checking in and admiring our quirky surroundings we drove into Santa Fe to do a little exploring. With every city we visit there’s always a decision to be made about the car, either we drive into the city and risk not finding decent, affordable parking, or, we make like locals and get public transport, also allowing both of us to have a few drinks if the mood strikes. In Santa Fe we found ourselves running out of hours and bit the bullet and drove the car into the town. Not knowing Santa Fe at all we were prepared for the chance that the drive could be a bit of an ordeal. Boy were we wrong, the drive in was a doddle, ten minutes later we were all parked up, pretty much in the centre of town with ample affordable parking all around us. Traffic does not seem to be an issue in Santa Fe.

We found our way to the historic plaza and set about on our wander. Santa Fe is one of America’s oldest cities, founded by the Spanish with a great aesthetic appeal. Walking the historic plaza feels like being in a small town. The architecture is overwhelmingly of the one kind, Adobe, which takes the form of red mud plaster. Its soft, rounded features are pleasant on the eye and feels like a trip back through time.

Looking super slick and not at all confused or sunburnt…

We strolled down to the Palace of the Governors, now a history museum but in the 17th century acted as Spain’s seat of government. Just outside on the portal, or the front porch of the Palace of Governors is an outdoor public market filled with some beautiful crafts, jewellery and art – pretty sure a creepy guy was eyeballing us here for a snatch and run as he followed us up and down the street, but other than that, it was lovely!

Palace of Governors front porch market

Walking the “Labyrinth”

From the Historic Plaza we walked over towards the art street district, Canyon road and checked out some galleries. Canyon road is fascinating place and if I ever have a few hundred g’s to drop on some art, I will certainly make my way back. If the sun wasn’t threatening to burn us to a crisp I could have spend hours watching the twirly thingys outside some of the galleries – really simple but really eye-catching.

Later on, as the hunger set in we went in search of a restaurant. Using TripAdvisor we found the Pantry restaurant, which just happened to be close by to our accommodation and had excellent reviews online. From the outside the restaurant looks…..unassuming. Inside however looks the part. Waiters swapped between English and Spanish depending on who they were serving. It was little empty as we came in but slowly filled up and, judging by the interactions between them and the servers, a lot of the clientele seemed like regulars. Here we had the best burritos so far on the trip, both choosing green chile, which is apparently a thing in New Mexico.

Later that night we were treated to a thunder and lightning storm lighting up the midnight sky. It lasted almost an hour and was incredible to watch, with giant forks of lightening seeming to impale the not too distant earth. We prepared ourselves to see more of this as we traveled further into the south and centre of the States.

The next morning we grabbed breakfast (definitely one of the better motel breakfasts we’ve had) and hit the road. A quick stop at Santa Fe’s outlet mall – and I mean really quick, it’s tiny – and we were on our way to Roswell, New Mexico.

our next destination: Roswell, NM ⇒