Meow Wolf is hard to explain, but very fun to experience. It is an art installation complete with mixed media, lights and sounds. When you enter, you go into a “house” of many rooms, interconnected by doorways, stairways, and slides. You can also go through the fireplace, enter the refrigerator, and walk through the back of closets. We tried every doorknob because you don’t know which ones will lead you to another exhibit.
Los Alamos, NM, is a short drive from Santa Fe. The Los Alamos National Lab is located there, and research from the secret Manhattan Project in WWII in Los Alamos resulted in the first atomic bomb. We toured the Bradbury Science Museum and took the walking tour of the historic neighborhood where scientists lived in the 1940s.
We traveled north one day in search of fiber arts galleries, tours, and yarn, but found the New Mexico Fiber Arts Trails website is sorely out of date – by as much as 6-8 years. Artists that used to participate in the fiber trail no longer do so, or artists still in business are closed for the winter season. However, we did have a lovely drive exploring hwy 84 north from Santa Fe to Tierra Amarilla and Los Ojos. We stopped at the Abiquiu Inn for lunch, then headed further north to Los Ojos where we discovered Tierra Wools was closed for the winter. On the way back to Santa Fe, we climbed to over 10,000 feet and traveled east across the Carson National Forest, then south on hwy 285 to Espanola where we discovered the Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center full of local yarn, crafts, roving and many floor-sized weaving looms for classes.
We took a day trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico, a very historic town about 50 miles northeast of our house. It was a thriving community on the Old Santa Fe Trail in the 1800s and by the late 1800s it was the largest city in New Mexico. The arrival of the railroad in 1879 boosted its fortunes but with the decline of rail travel in the 1950s its economy suffered. Fred Harvey established one of his finest railside hotels in Las Vegas in 1899, the Castaneda Hotel. It fell into decay but is currently being restored by the same group that restored the Harvey House, La Posada, in Winslow.
