Santa Fe is the small and arty capital city of New Mexico. Since I first moved to the state almost two years before this trip, I'd stopped in Santa Fe a couple times, but just to spend the night at a hotel, eat dinner, and stop at some bars in between trips to the nearby ski resort, Ski Santa Fe. Neither one of these visits really felt like enough and I wanted to stop and look around for longer, and also check out this Meow Wolf place I'd heard so much about.

So, since I had a couple days after Thanksgiving 2022 to go take a short trip somewhere, I decided I would do my long-awaited Santa Fe visit then. Since I had enough Wyndham reward points for it, I reserved a night at a Days Inn free of charge.

Friday, November 25, 2022

Driving there took about three hours from Clovis, which is in the eastern part of the state right next to the Texas state line. At the end of the drive, I just have to mention a quirk of Interstate 25 that may confuse people taking this route for the first time. I-25 runs north-south, but of course it's not a straight line and there is this kink, for lack of a better term, in the road right around where Santa Fe lies. If you're driving north on I-25, you'll actually turn south for a few miles before turning back to the north on your way to Denver. That means that there's a few miles where traffic will be driving south on I-25 North and vice versa. That also means that if I'm driving north on US Route 285 toward Santa Fe, when it merges with I-25 I'll have to follow the signs reading "I-25 South" in order to continue driving north. The first time I drove this way it was a little confusing.

My hotel was on Cerrillos Road, a few miles southwest of the city center. If you're not familiar with how Santa Fe is laid out, it has a compact, walkable central city, and then this long thoroughfare, the kind of road some people might refer to as a "stroad," named Cerrillos Road, leading southwest away from the city center for several miles. Cerrillos is lined with strip malls and hotels and most of the city's more recent residential development.

For dinner, after checking into Days Inn, I walked across Cerrillos and a little bit southwest to a restaurant called Tortilla Flats. Not bad if you're looking for New Mexico cuisine. I had tortilla soup and a side of squash and corn with cheese.

While sitting at a table at Tortilla Flats I decided that Meow Wolf should be my next stop, since it was a short walk from the restaurant. Looking at its website on my phone, I saw you had to buy a ticket in advance. They only let limited amounts of people in at certain times, at regular intervals, so you have to buy a ticket for a specific time. After you get in, though, you can stay as long as you want. I bought my ticket for 7:40 pm.

Meow Wolf was another short walk from Tortilla Flats. You have to line up outside and then get let in when your time slot comes up. Inside the doors but before all the art, there are lockers you can rent to store anything you're carrying, the obligatory gift shop, and a bar.

There are, as of 2023, four Meow Wolf locations, and each one has its own loose theme and a fictional backstory. The one in Santa Fe is subtitled "House of Eternal Return" and it's supposed to be an ordinary-looking house in which a scientist accidentally opened portals to other universes. The backstory seemed interesting, but getting fully immersed in it meant reading a lot of papers and watching videos in certain parts of the house, and I really wanted  to just explore the whole space more.

Meow Wolf is often described as an "immersive art experience." I'd heard so much about the place before but still wasn't sure what to expect. After going through it, if I could describe it in one word, it would be dreamy. And I mean that as literal as possible; think of the actual dreams you have when you are asleep, think of how bizarre and surreal those dreams are, and you'll have a good idea of what you'll see inside Meow Wolf.

After you enter the experience, the first thing you see is the front of the house which contains all the portals.

Walk inside and it looks like any other house. It has two stories, there's a living room, a kitchen, bedrooms, and a bathroom, with the portals to other universes hidden in plain sight. Open up the fridge in the kitchen, there's a tunnel to somewhere bizarre inside. You'll wind up somewhere that's another kind of bizarre by walking into one of the bedroom closets. And all these bizarre worlds are connected, and it's easy to get lost, so while you're wandering around you might end up wandering back into the house.

In the bathroom, the fabric of our universe has rippled a little bit.

In some areas you can find fantastic art made out of totally ordinary objects.

Then there's this one room that looks like a cartoon.

There's also this space with a stage. Meow Wolf occasionally hosts some musical performances; sometime much earlier in the year LSDream played a set here. I would've gone to it if it hadn't been on a Thursday night.

This is what I mean when I say this place seems like something out of a dream. It doesn't get more surreal than this.

This little bit looks like a narrow city street, but with Meow Wolf's usual surrealism. Denver's Meow Wolf has a similar section that's much larger.

Another large "universe" looks like a really otherworldly forest, with elevated walkways among the trees, and the treehouse you see here.

I don't want to dump too many photos of Meow Wolf here; this isn't Instagram, and I don't want to spoil it too much for any of you who want to go there.

And so, I really enjoyed this experience. Much of the art within reminded me of the art installations I've seen at music festivals like Electric Forest and Suwannee Hulaween, but on a much grander scale. The other three Meow Wolves are in Denver (Convergence Station), Las Vegas (Omega Mart), and the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb Grapevine (The Real Unreal). Just over a month after my stop in Santa Fe, I got to experience the one in Denver, and hopefully I'll be able to hit up the one in Grapevine before 2023 is over.

I left Meow Wolf right at the time it was closing, so no time to stop at their bar. At this point I wanted to go downtown and do some bar hopping, but I had no way of getting there. The city buses weren't running that night because they were still on a holiday schedule, and I wasn't about to drive myself. Looking on Apple Maps, there was only one establishment that was within walking distance of my hotel and wasn't about to close: Leaf & Hive Brewlab.

It took a little more than a few minutes to walk to Leaf & Hive Brewlab. I was expecting it to be just another brewpub, but it was actually something quite unique. What they brew there isn't like any beer I've ever had. They call their drinks "honeybrews" which they describe as "alcoholic tea" and are brewed with organic herbs and honey, whence the name of the brewery. These honeybrews are carbonated like beer and have a similar ABV range, between 6% and 10%, but they taste a little like tea with a fruity tinge, and with colorings that make them look more like fruit drinks than beer.

I drank two honeybrews. The first was called Rosebud, which had a reddish hue and was 6% ABV. The second was the House OG, 7% ABV and pink, brewed with oolong tea. It's hard to describe the flavor beyond what I've already come up with, since this was all brand new to me and I haven't had any more since; a little bit like tea and a little bit fruity--but not at all like cider--with carbonation.

They also make some craft cocktails there. I had one, called Crosseyed & Painless, made with vodka, amaro, white vermouth, mint simple syrup, lime juice, soda, and lime.

So I'll definitely recommend Leaf & Hive Brewlab to any other visitors. Looking for beer, but want to try something different that you've really never tasted anything like before? This is where to go.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

With Friday being spent close to the southwest edge of the city, further away from the center, Saturday was going to be devoted to downtown. I got myself breakfast from a Denny's next to the hotel, checked out of the hotel, and drove downtown where I left my car in a public garage.

First I walked into Ikonik Coffee where I got an Americano. This café is part of the adjoining Collected Works bookstore.

Next, into the heart of the city...

This central square is called the Zócalo. Squares like this one are a common feature of the cities that the Spanish built in what was once known as New Spain. There's also a Zócalo in Mérida and in Mexico City.

Now we're at a place you'll walk right by if you don't already know it's there. It was thanks to Atlas Obscura that I knew about it. What does that plaque say?

Scientists working on the Manhattan Project, in which the atomic bomb was developed, would board a secret train here every day which brought them to their laboratory in Los Alamos.

Next, I walked a few blocks southwest from the square to the Railyard. This place isn't just a train station; it's also a shopping and restaurant area.

Here you can see a New Mexico Rail Runner Express train parked here. These trains go back and forth between Santa Fe and Albuquerque several times a day. The journey takes about an hour and a half, and it was almost nine months after this visit that I finally rode this train.

They've also got a couple of vintage Santa Fe Railroad cars on display at the Railyard. Too bad you can't walk inside and look around. These were probably built in the 1930s or '40s.

I wasn't at the Railyard to ride any trains, though. They have a farmers' market there on Saturday mornings where you can buy some local fresh produce. Here I bought some interesting-looking carrots. Most of the carrots you find in any grocery store are almost always orange, but it turns out carrots can have a variety of colors; the orange ones are just much more commonly grown. So, I bought a bunch of purple carrots and some red carrots because I don't encounter those nearly as often.

For lunch I stopped at a restaurant at the Railyard called Boxcar. The place was packed with crowds watching various sporting events on the TVs, mostly college football games but also an Argentina-Mexico international soccer match. For lunch I had a bowl of green chile chili. That is, chili--the soup--made with green chile peppers. New Mexican food is known for red and green chile peppers, and I like the green slightly more.

I had only two more things to do in Santa Fe before driving home. First was just grocery shopping; I took care of that at a local food co-op and at Market Street, an organic store. The other thing was the Museum of International Folk Art.

The folk art museum turned out to be worthwhile. The first exhibit I walked through, Yōkai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan, was about depictions of ghosts in Japanese stories, from centuries-old folktales to the modern animated films of Hayao Miyazaki.

Another exhibit was named Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia. It focused on the traditional clothing of the Norwegians, the Swedish, and the Sámi.

Sámi gákti. The Sámi live in the northernmost reaches of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, around the Arctic Circle.

Swedish folkdräkt

The centerpiece of the museum is the permanent exhibit Multiple Visions: A Common Bond. It doesn't really have a specific theme, and there's just so much on display there you could probably visit multiple times and not feel like you're seeing the same stuff again.

Yeah, that was a worthwhile stop and I'll recommend it. Even if a topic like folk art doesn't draw you in, you should still check it out because you might be surprised how interesting you find it.

After that last museum, my stay in Santa Fe was over and it was time to start the three-hour drive home. Santa Fe has to be my favorite city in the state of New Mexico. With a population of almost 90,000, it's not really a "big" city but it feels like more of a cultural hub than many other bigger, more populous cities I've recently visited. It has the kind of hippie vibes you'll feel in Austin, with more of a focus on art. Restaurants serve delicious and spicy New Mexican dishes. And of course there's Meow Wolf. Definitely worth more visits.