Santa Fe, NM

Tuesday:

We took a little drive around Las Vegas, NM in the morning before departing Storrie Lake SP.

We exited I25 to take old Route 66 through Pecos and discovered Pecos National Historic Site. We toured the old Indian ruins and heard about the great civil war battles that occurred here.

A short path leads to the Pecos Ruins.


The ruins date back to pre Spanish arrival.

We continued on to Santa Fe. We parked at Wal-mart's and drove to the Whole Hog BarBQ. Lou had a craving. We shared a nice platter of their best. It was good.

We continued to Old Town Santa Fe. After I parked the car, being the perfectionist I am, I got back in the car to reposition the car in the space before we continued our walk. I found that the car wouldn't start. We took a little walk around town and then returned to the car and called road service. This was a bad experience with Good Sam VSP. The operator expected me to know where it should be taken for repair. That's really peculiar. Then, we waited for 3.5 hours and the truck still hadn't arrived. I kept trying to start the car and finally it responded, so we left and cancelled the "tow". The neutral position switch is probably bad. We made it back to the RV at Wal-mart's and it won't start again. Fortunately, we're about two blocks away from the Volvo dealer here. The breakdown kind of ruined our afternoon.
On the good side, we didn't breakdown in Denver when we really needed the car, the food was good, and the weather was good all day.

Wednesday:

We got the car to the garage early and it may be a couple of days before they get it fixed. We walked around a little and asked where there was a good restaurant. The Pantry just a few blocks up Cerrillos Rd was the recommendation. Off we went. Good choice. We shared the best homemade corned beef breakfast we've had. Even beats my own. Ummm!

We caught to bus back to Wal-mart's. We bought day passes for $2 each. We'll go explore some later.

We caught the bus down to the local shopping center. I couldn't resist a couple of driving hats, my normal headgear. Target also had another RC jet like the one we have, so we got it to reduce competition. We can now both fly at the same time.

Thursday:

A bit colder last night. The outside temperature was 30 degrees at 8:00 am. While it remained brisk all day, it did warm to the high 50's. Clear sky all day, good for the solar.

After breakfast of corned beef hash again at The Pantry, we dropped by the auto club to get a couple of maps and looked at a few new cars at a couple of the dealers nearby. Just dreaming but we are considering a new toad, but nothing we looked at could be towed on all four wheels. We'll probably go to the auto show in San Francisco later this winter. Maybe that will help.

We went back downtown and looked around everywhere. We had a nice German lunch at a deli by the town plaza. Excellent hot red potato salad. We stopped by the Wild Oats Market and Trader Joe's for a look and picked up a couple of things.

After resting at the RV for a couple of hours we went out to dinner at a good Chinese buffet nearby. We didn't do good about eating at home but did have a nice day.

Friday:

We tinkered around the RV this morning. About 11am the repair shop called, our car was ready. We picked up the car. They replaced a switch on the transmission, the ignition switch, the indicator cap on the gear selector, and did a recall repair. Interesting that they are still doing recall repairs on a 20 year old car. The problem was the traansmission switch, the other stuff just needed to be done.
We hopped around various stores nearby to test the starting. It worked nicely. One of the places we stopped was Jackalopes, an interesting store here in Santa Fe. They have several other stores but this one is huge. They have an unusual assortment of pottery, statuary, imports, furniture and also some craft concessionaires. We enjoyed watching a couple making flowers and decorated figurines in one of the buildings.

We then headed toward Taos stopping at several casinos and some other shops. We had dinner at one of the casinos. We only made it as far as Espanola and then returned to Santa Fe. We'll be leaving for Albuquerque in the morning.