First, for those who are wondering, we are safely settled in a friend’s condo in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are both healthy and hope to stay that way. We avoid crowds and our main activity is taking long walks around Santa Fe, a unique and historical city. We are only about a half mile from the old plaza so there are many interesting places to walk just outside our door. There are few tourists left in town so social distancing is easy. We hope all of our friends and family are healthy, as well.
Carrie received a yarn Advent Calendar last year, consisting of 24 mini-skeins of yarn, one to be revealed each day before Christmas. In addition to knitting a large shawl, she is using bits of leftover yarn for a mystery knit-along hosted by two Norwegian designers who are quarantined for 14 days in their home in the Norwegian mountains after disembarking from a cruise last week. A pattern for a patch is released every weekday for 2 weeks, with the final project revealed at the end. Mixing unusual colors into unfamiliar patterns is providing new and interesting combinations that Carrie wouldn’t have considered before. The silver lining of self isolation?
Before we came to Santa Fe we spent two weeks in Albuquerque, house sitting and cat sitting for friends. We had sat for them before and Mai-Mai seemed glad to see us. Rocio, more reserved and more cat-like, seemed to wish we would go away most of the time. We enjoyed revisiting some of our favorite walking paths along the Rio Grande, including the Bachechi Open Space.
One day while in Albuquerque we drove about 100 miles south to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, along the Rio Grande just south of Socorro. Bosque del Apache is well-known in the Southwest for its abundance of migratory birds. Mid-winter is the peak bird season so we were a little late for the most spectacular sightings, but we did see many birds and we enjoyed the day. On the way we stopped for lunch at the Buckhorn Tavern in San Antonio, NM, well-known for their green chile cheeseburgers, a New Mexico specialty.
