New Mexico

A couple weeks ago I went to Albuquerque for my girlfriend's nephew's high school graduation. While there, we naturally had to visit her friends in Santa Fe, being only about 40 mins from Albuquerque.  Gorgeous weather, great friends and killer food (if you've never had a New Mexico green or red chile, then you don't know what good chiles are), made for a nice trip.  

Some of getting older, I'm starting to learn is seeing friends and family get older.  When you're younger, you don't necessarily have friends with children, moving on in their marriages, their lives; heading out to Santa Fe, somewhere we visited as recently as last August, helped me witness these friends and family move along in their lives.  

Alicia's sister, Yvonne has a two year-old daughter who is beginning to speak.  Each time we visit, there is something new to watch and discover.  Any time I entered a room, she just stared.  No reaction, good or bad, just a focused stare.  These are fairly evident in every picture I took.  Really, that's exactly what she looks like every time I enter the room, remaining that way until I leave.  I suppose it's better than if she were to cry every time I made an entrance.

This is Alicia's niece.  The photo up top is pretty much what she does when I'm in the room:  stares at me, even if a bunch of other things are going on.  The bottom photo is one of her "air raid" moments, when she cries (which is pretty rare).  It really does sound like an air raid siren.

Below is our friend's child, whom we've seen grow in leaps and bounds over the past 3 years.  Here, I thought she was hamming it up for the camera, but I think she liked looking at the reflection in the lens.  Either way, she was a great camera subject.

Skies over Santa Fe.  I wish we were higher up, but oh well.  We saw the skies, jumped out and walked around.  Don't see that too often in DC...  One thing we did do, that was amazing, was hike.  I can't say that I'm an avid hiker, but again, out east it's a minimum of 1 hour drive.  The drive is not the scenic kind either, but the kind that snakes it way through snarled traffic along I-66 (hopefully avoiding any horrible, mind-numbing accident-type traffic), and finally arriving in Shenandoah where you pay a small fee, and walk along relatively flat forested trails in deciduous forest, YAY!  In Santa Fe, you drive 5 minutes into the Santa Fe national forest, and depending on how much further you want to go, you can either hike straight into the Sangre De Cristo's, head out to Bandelier National Monument or  Taos.  Not to mention the weather, lack of bugs.  We did not see any bears or pumas, although they are present.  we ended up just taking a couple simple trails a few minutes away.  But the elevated trails were pretty damn tough, even though they're rated "easy".

One of the coolest parts of our trip was visiting our friend's boyfriends property outside Santa Fe.  We actually sat in a hot tub in the middle of nowhere.  Friggin' awesome.

The dogs were part of the trip out to Tesuque.  One border collie and two others, all in the back of the Jeep Cherokee. 

But ultimately, the reason we came out to NM, was to see this guy graduate...