Waking up around 8:30 a.m., we both heard Annie watching Dora the explorer in the living room. After quick showers, we headed over with Kathy, Annie and Lara to the sculpture garden across the street from their house. A local family of artists has a gallery of various metal sculptures made of bronze, steel, aluminum and various other materials. Next door to the sculpture garden was a glass art gallery. We got to watch a glass blower making a seashell piece while we were there.
We went back across the street to their place to get Iris and then head up to the new house that they were building. It was about 1.5 miles from their current house, up in the hills above Santa Fe. The house was probably about 90% complete, built on 8 acres of land overlooking Santa Fe. They were finishing the final touches on the house, and Patrick and Kathy hope to move in a month or so. The house looked great and will be amazing when it is complete—we loved the pueblo architecture, and the three fireplaces! We said goodbye to Kathy, the kids and Iris at the house site and then carried on to downtown Santa Fe.
We headed straight to the plaza in Santa Fe. Since Santa Fe was settled by Spaniards, its setup like most Spanish cities with a main plaza serving as the center of the city. We parked the car and walked around town. We found a placed called Blue Corn Café and Brewery for lunch. The High Altitude Pale Ale was excellent and the tacos and burritos were delicious. After lunch we did some window shopping in the town and local market. Then back in the car and onto our next destination: Tucumcari, NM.
Kathy’s dad is a blacksmith and her parents have a tool shop in Tucumcari. We got the full tour of the shop from Kathy’s parents; Jim (the labor) and Carole (management). Jim even hand forged a horseshoe as a souvenir for us. Kathy’s dad (Jim Keith) is a well respected blacksmith who has won numerous awards for his work. Dermot was happier than a pig in sh*t (as any metallurgist would be) watching the hot metal get formed.
It was very interesting getting to see the Keith’s shop and hear the story about how they progressed from a horseshoe manufacturer to a blacksmith tooling manufacturer.
After our tour we got on the road towards Oklahoma City. We drove until Dermot got tired at around 10 p.m. (His desire to watch Monday night football might have increased his “drowsiness”) We got off the highway in Elk City, OK and started looking for a hotel. We settled on the newly built (7 months old, we found out) Comfort Suites. We never ate dinner, so after getting our room we drove to a Sonic Drive In, ate dinner and then returned to our hotel. We originally were going to go to a sports bar for dinner, but when we got there it looked a little to “local” for our tastes.
The parking lot was quite comical at our hotel, there was our Mazda Protégé 5 surrounded by (no exaggeration) 15 large pickup trucks (all the trucks were F-250s or bigger). Our car looked like the skinny kid standing in between the big football players in high school gym class. Back to the hotel….we watched the second half of the 49ers/Cardinals game (how did the Cardinals blow that one?). After the game we did a little more trip planning and website work and then hit the hay.