Taos, New Mexico

Date: July 20, 2002
Current location: Taos, NM
Odometer: 73,717



Taos has the mystique of a hip artist town, but I find the reality to be more a pretty frontier town.  My opinion is probably influenced by the Fiesta de Taos that is going on while we're here.  They just crowned the beauty queen and held the opening parade yesterday.  We walked around the booths selling fajitas, funnel cakes, and carmel apples.  I had a carmel apple, but it wasn't as yummy as Diffenbachers in Indiana.

My opinion is also influenced by the fact that I can't get a cell phone signal here and Earthlink doesn't have any dialup numbers here.  Thank goodness for the public library.  I got there a little before opening time on a Saturday morning and there were already people waiting out front.  For a buck, I got 30 minutes of internet time on one of the 5 machines.  Half of the people in the library were there for the computers.  After my time was up, I read a recent Monitor.

Julie found all the yarn, wool, and weaving stores in town.  She even stumbled into a dyeing class at the famous La Lana Wools, so we'll be extending our stay here an extra day or two for that.  This is just the sort of excuse I've been looking for to avoid going to Moab.  Now I'll be able to say that we just ran out of time for Moab instead of we went there and looked at it, but were too scared to ride Slick Rock trail.

While Julie was in her first day of class, I did some laundry and watched Reign of Fire.  It seemed like the movie that is least likely to be missed by Julie.  I should have missed it myself.  Maybe that's a little too harsh.  There were some nice dragon interpretations and a couple of good accents.  What audience is this movie pointed at?  The seventh graders in Taos public schools are being assigned Tolkien for summer reading, so maybe this is for the fifth graders to get used to the idea of dragons.  
I predict that anyone above fifth grade level will be pretty bored by this movie.

On the second day of Julie's class, I went to church and ran into Brook Holmberg.  Imagine that.

Then, I went to the bike shop in town (Gearing Up) and  got info on the easiest mountain bike trail in Taos.  They directed me to the West Rim trail on the Rio Grande.  This is a situation when it would have been nice to have two cameras.

The Rio Grande gorge was spectacular.  The west rim trail had great views down into the canyon.  But Julie had the camera at her class with Luisa Gelenter (right).
dyeing class
The trail was completely exposed and I got a pretty late start.  Thunderstorms were predicted for the afternoon and I was constantly working to be back before any lightning strikes might happen.  But Julie had the camera at her class.
dyeing
The thing that made the trail challenging was picking out the path through all the small, sharp, volcanic rocks.  It was also difficult to judge when to turn around because it sloped down away from the trailhead.  So I wasn't too sure how hard it would be to go uphill all the way back.  I went out about 2 or 3 miles and then started back to try to beat the rain.
dyeing workshop
Another difficult thing about the trail was scheduling my mouth time.  I wanted to keep taking drinks from my Camelback, but it was hard to find time when I wasn't breathing.  Taking a drink was just too much time away from breathing.
colored wool
On the way out of town, we actually got a shot of the Rio Grande gorge from the point of view of the trailhead.
rio grande

After the ride and picking up Julie from her class, we went to dinner with Brook and Jen at the Apple Tree.  Yum.

On our way out of Taos we stopped at an Indian reservation called Taos Pueblo for a tour.  It is a walled adobe village with some buildings 3 or 4 stories high.  We don't have any pictures from there because it felt weird to pay the $20 photography fee.



How to contact us:
    rfd@finninday.net
    jfd@finninday.net