I got to Santa Fe last last night. It wasn't a bad drive or even that far but after the last couple of days, by the time I got here I was barely coherent. I just stopped at the first hotel I saw.

When I got up and out, I headed for down town Santa Fe. I figured that would be a good place to get my bearings and decide what to do from there. Besides, I figured that there would be cool old adobe buildings downtown.

Downtown Santa Fe is really nice. I can imagine spending a few long weekends here. While it's a very touristy place, it's still quite nice. All the buildings are adobe and the modern ones are done so well it's hard to tell them apart from the really old ones. I didn't find anything that I really wanted to take a picture of, so I just played tourist for the afternoon.

Santa Fe has more galleries than any town I've ever seen.  I picked up a copy of this free guide called the "Collectors Guide" and it has over 300 galleries listed in it. There's a pretty good rundown of what each gallery shows so I decided to find some of the photography galleries in the area. But first I grabbed a bite to eat in a cute little rooftop cantina. Santa Fe also has a lot of really good southwestern restaurants.

While wandering around downtown I found several smaller galleries and then I hit the jackpot so to speak. I found a gallery that had major works from some of the world's most famous photographers, both current and vintage. I saw works from Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward and Brett Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others who's names escape me now. Among the most notable photographs I saw was the picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono that was taken on the morning of his death. And there were two huge Ansel Adams prints, each at least 60" tall. The first was a picture of El Capitan in Yosemite and the second (and rarer of the two) was a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe priced at $65,000 and $45,000 respectively. His rarer prints always seem to be the cheaper ones for some reason.

After that I decided to head or for Taos, a nearby town that is sort of an artist colony of sorts. There is also a very famous adobe church nearby that I wanted to see. As I was walking back to the car I pasted the historic St. Francis of Assisi church just as the 3 o'clock bells were ringing.

The scenic way to Taos was really hard to find. I had maps but none of the streets or highways had signs. It ended up taking me way longer than it should have to get there. Along the way I passed a few old adobe churches and several ancient pueblos. However, all the pueblos were on reservation land and they all had big signs posted that cameras weren't allowed. After one or two of these I just stopped even bothering with them.

When I finally made it to Taos, the sun was already setting and most of the places were already in the shade. The one place I was so eager to get to, the Mission of St. Francis of Assisi, was totally in shade. It's probably better though, this is a very photographed place and it is very recognizable. But the town itself is pretty cool. I would like to spend a few days here exploring a little more.

The one thing I've come to realize about trying to find the cool places in New Mexico is that it takes a lot of time. I would have been much better off by doing more research up front but even then I think it will still take a lot of wandering around time to find the coolest places.

So with sunset past and only 3 days left, I spent some time pouring over maps and trying to figure out my route home. I called the guys back in Page, Arizona but they were still swamped in so that wouldn't work. And I had also considered making one more crazy drive all to way to Yellowstone before returning to Seattle but after consulting 'Doug the weatherman' (a.k.a. Doug back in Seattle with internet access) it didn't look good. It would have been a crazy drive anyways, something like 1,700 miles in 2 days. So, I decided to just take the most direct route home, still a lot of miles but I figured if I drove 8-10 hours a day I could be back in Seattle by early Sunday. And it turned out that the Direct route would take me by several National Parks. Mesa Verde which I have never been to, Arches back in Utah, and Mount Rainer which would only be 50 or so miles out of the way.

So with that, I headed off for Colorado which by now was only a few hundred miles away.