Day 12 - Santa Fe

 

Coffee and pastries at La Fonda's French Pastry Shop was a great start to the day. It was Sunday morning, and it was First Holy Communion at the Basilica of St. Francis for a few youngsters. The girls were dressed in outfits that could have suited a bride; the boy looked awkward. A pipe organ and violin filtered beautifully down from the choir loft. A few blocks away we discovered the DeVargas Street house, one of the oldest buildings in the US. Its origin is unknown, but it is believed to date to the Spanish colonial period around 1610. Across the street is San Miguel Chapel, described as the oldest church in the US, also around 1610. The founding priests brought grapes with them, making New Mexico the oldest wine-growing state.

To continue the peace and contemplation found in these churches, we set out on Santa Fe's art scene. We began with Georgia O'Keeffe. Although she lived in New York for the first part of her career, she began to visit the southwest in 1929 and bought a home in New Mexico in 1949. Her work reminded us of a contemporary Canadian artist of the time, Emily Carr. Both explored their environment and painted their impressions of what they saw, breaking from the established patterns for art and for women. They were also strongly influenced by the Native cultures that surrounded them. 

O'Keeffe worked mostly in oil and watercolor, but she worked in pastel as well, often setting out sketches before creating a painting. The museum displayed some of her working materials, pigments, brushes, and so on.

 After a quick lunch of tacos and salsa, we headed up Canyon Road where there are over 100 galleries. It was overwhelming, on and on nearly a mile up the street. We saw so much amazing artwork but managed to get back to the hotel without breaking the bank. 

License plate count - Alaska, Arizona, Arizona Navajo Nation, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee. Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and the US Government. And from Oh Canada - British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Quebec. And from Mexico - Sonora.

When we moved to the US, I discovered the writer Willa Cather, who reminded me of Canada's Nellie McClung. She soon became a favorite and her novel, Death Comes for the Archibishop, is in my top ten faves 'of all time'. It is based on the story of Father Lamy, a Jesuit priest assigned the New Mexico Territory as his region. He was the force behind the building of Santa Fe's Basilica.

Today's song is by a well-known singer, but it's not so well known that he was born in Roswell, NM, to a military family. After New Mexico, the family spent six years in Tucson, where John sang in the Tucson Boys Chorus. Anyway, here's the song, John Denver "On The Road" - YouTube.