Taos or/a Bust

So yesterday we drove to Taos from Santa Fe. It was a day trip I've long intended to make so here we were with enough time in Santa Fe to do it. Some guides suggest taking the High Road up and the Low Road back; others recommend the opposite. I don't think it matters a whole lot. You see some of the Rio Grande Gorge on the Low Road and it's nice, as was the friendly desk officer at the National Parks Service center for that part of the Rio Grande valley. Best sight was the view of the mountains looming past Taos.

But neither route lived up to its advance ballyhoo, and nor did Taos itself. I suppose I mayn't have enjoyed all the views on the High Road since I had to focus just a tad on driving, but I have had to do that for most of my life when negotiating the curves on the Bear Mountain Bridge Road high above the Hudson, so I'll leave it at that.

Taos has lots of galleries, which if that's your thing, probably makes a big difference, as it does, but to a far lesser degree, it would seem, in Santa Fe. Even the guidebooks concede that Taos Plaza is one sleazy commercial strip but there seemed to be a lot of those. The Taos Pueblo has history--inhabited for the past 1000 years or so--but yesterday they were doing road work so you had to park quite a ways away and wait for a shuttle--yes, you know the drill and I suppose my patience was not weighing in at record high levels, so, since I figured I wasn't going to scale the ladders anyway...

But we did head out to the Millicent Rogers Museum (MRM, to locals) which is a fine collection of Southwestern jewelry, religious objects and paintings, pottery, some paintings, and more. Learning about Maria Montoya's pottery--e.g., black relief on black--was excellent but if, as one source touted, this was the best museum in Taos, I missed little by skipping the rest.

Santa Fe is a delight, even if we're resisting that music tempting us to open up a restaurant here. There are already plenty of more than decent eateries and lots else going on. On the day we got here there was a sold-out chamber music concert and a Shakespeare company was doing The Tempest. I did come especially for the opera and so far, that's been superb, along with that marvelous line of the mountains and sunset looming out past the stage as the show starts.