Still Here

Bella has shamed me into taking up pen, so to speak, and reinvigorating my blog. We had a wonderful time in Santa Fe. It was a week of seeing sights, eating great food and taking in new experiences. Some of all these are shown below. I'll try and do it in several posts. This first one is from the time Nancy and I arrived through Saturday, July 4.




The first day (Thursday) Nancy and I took a 10,000 to 11,000 foot hike in the Santa Fe National Forest. This is a (unclear) picture of Santa Fe taken while on our hike. The trail was easy but constantly up.










This is a picture of a gorgeous spruce forest that covered I don't know how many acres that we walked in on the hike.












The next day (Friday) we traveled to 3 small towns to look at art galleries and Native American jewelry and art works. Here's a picture of a Christ statue outside of a (the) church in one of the small towns we visited.


And a cactus that we saw along the way. There actually weren't that many cacti out there but some of the ones that were there looked deadly like this one. Along the way we visited mucho art galleries that displayed all kinds of art. Apparently Santa Fe and the surrounding area sells more art than anywhere else in the USA except for New York City.




Saturday, July 4, Polly, Mark, Isabella,Grace, Sara, Wes and Ella all arrived in the afternoon. We were able to get into the house in the morning and do some shopping so things were at least partially settled when they got there. We had a great view of the mountains and just a short walk to downtown Santa Fe. Here's the view:



Once everyone arrived they lost no time in settling in. this is a gathering in the kitchen;


Here's a couple of pictures of our outdoor table where we ate most of our dinners.















Night finally came and with it fireworks. We could see some of the town fireworks but decided not to go out to see the official Santa Fe ones. We did, however have our own:















To be honest, Ella was tired and went to bed before the sparklers got started so we had some just for her the next evening.

That ended the fourth for us. Everyone was somewhat tired from traveling and the time change and went to bed relatively early. More about the week later.