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Carrie’s two favorite French yarn stores are in the 13th arrondissement in Paris, La Bien Aimee and L’Oisive The. It was fun to visit a totally non-tourist part of Paris and to speak “yarn” to non-English-speaking yarn-shop owners. Between sign language, squeezing the yarn, and pointing to body parts, lovely yarns were purchased!
https://www.labienaimee.com/
http://www.loisivethe.com/

Both shops are located in the old Butte-aux-Cailles village of Paris. The Butte aux Cailles was annexed into Paris in 1860 and was historically a working class district. It has progressively become a favourite spot for artists and hipsters. Nevertheless it has kept its village atmosphere and has not changed much since 1945 thanks to its narrow cobblestone streets and its lovely houses which cannot be replaced by higher buildings because of the limestone quarries underground.

The Butte aux Cailles: a Must-See Village in Paris

After a day recovering from jet lag, we started seeing the sights of Paris. To get oriented, we walked down the Champs-Elysees to the Louvre. The next day, we toured the Orsay Museum. It was easy to get around with our multi-day transportation passes for the metro and the buses.

The Orsay is a museum in a train station. The history of the museum, of its building is quite unusual. In the centre of Paris on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Tuileries Gardens, the museum was installed in the former Orsay railway station, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. So the building itself could be seen as the first “work of art” in the Musee d’Orsay, which displays collections of art from the period 1848 to 1914.
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/home.html

We took the Oatman-Topock Road along the previous site of Route 66 over a winding mountain pass. In the old days before there were fuel pumps in cars, some cars would climb the mountain in reverse to guarantee fuel would get to the engine by gravity. We descended on the other side through Oatman, a touristy town where the burros have learned they can roam freely in the streets. It was so crowded with people, we couldn’t park and weren’t interested in mingling with the crowd anyway.

We left Santa Fe today after a 6-week stay. We will miss this place and the neighborhood. There was so much to do and to explore, we would like to return to visit the sights that we missed. Here are a few odds and ends pictures from our stay:

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.

The New Mexico History Museum has an exhibit on the history of the Fred Harvey Company. The exhibit details greatly enhanced our knowledge and enjoyment of our Harvey House tours.  “Artifacts in the exhibit include: the original Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway track sign for Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel; Harvey Girl uniforms (including the unique embroidered blouse worn by La Fonda waitresses in the 1950s); furniture designed by famed architect and interior decorator Mary Colter; hand-stamped Navajo spoons; Fred Harvey’s original datebook and an iconic painting of the man behind the empire. Other artifacts include a gong similar to ones that rang travelers to their meals (this one hung in the company’s Chicago office) and an original Doris Lee painting while helping to plan MGM’s The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland. The image Lee created was adopted by the Harvey Company and used on menus at El Navajo in Gallup and El Tovar at the Grand Canyon.”

Our house is out in the desert about 12 miles southeast of Santa Fe.  The houses are on 2 to 5 acre lots so there is a lot of open land.  We both enjoy long walks throughout the neighborhood.