Route 66 - Day 8 (Santa Fe)

Today I stayed in Santa Fe. I started off the day at Meow Wolf which is a recent art installation / immersive experience that's all the rage in the performance community right now. It's set up as a sort of game where they tell you this whole family disappeared and you're exploring their house which landed in Santa Fe after having disappeared into the sky in Mendocino, CA and you're supposed to figure out what happened to the family. They built the house inside an old climbing gym and it starts off as a normal house but then you open the refrigerator door in the kitchen or the closet door in a bedroom and you can walk through into another dimension. Super-detailed and colorful with tons of winding, mazelike ways of making your way through the space. The kids obviously love it but it's pretty fun as an adult too -- lots of stuff to interact with. The conclusion I came to is that the grandfather of the family was doing science experiments which brought about the Singularity and alien lifeforms from the future came to pick up the family. :) After Meow Wolf, I headed to the historic Plaza district. I started with the Georgia O'Keeffe museum which was great -- they have a lot of her New Mexico paintings which are my favorite. Then I had a really wonderful talkative lunch at a place called The Shed which has been around since the 70s. It's very popular so they cram people in wherever they can -- I ended up at a counter with a hippie activist named Marcy from Durango, CO (she's probably 80?), a couple from Atlanta GA and a young-ish (my age) fibre artist from Pittsburgh who's in town for the Folk Art Market. Great conversations about opera and food and Santa Fe's history and death. After lunch I went to the New Mexico History Museum exhibits which start with the Spanish in the 1500s and take you all the way to statehood and present day and then to the Palace of Governors which is a neat building. No longer the Governor's official residence, it now houses art and history exhibitions and you can see some of the old foundations of the original building. I walked over to The Loretto Chapel which features the 'Miraculous Staircase' - a staircase built in the 1800s out of one piece of wood and without using nails/screws etc -- and on to San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church in the USA. I came back to Hotel Santa Fe and had dinner on the patio where a live Native musician, Ronald Roybal, played Spanish guitar and Native American flute. Such a lovely way to end the evening. 

Meow Wolf

Mule's Skull with Pink Poinsettia, Georgia O'Keeffe

Miraculous Staircase, The Loretto Chapel, Santa Fe