South Congress

True to its motto, "Keep Austin weird," Austin, Texas is a weird city. Nowhere is this weirdness exemplified better than on South Congress Avenue, a wide boulevard a few miles south of the capitol. South Congress, or SoCo as it's sometimes called, is a long stretch of the street replete with food trucks, restaurants, cafes, vintage clothing stores, antique shops, and cozy hotels. The patrons on South Congress are as weird as the stores, ranging from youthful hipsters to big-haired old women.

Most of the fun is just strolling down South Congress and gawking. It bears some similarities, I thought, to South Street in Philadelphia. I first browsed the food trucks before settling on SnackBar for a late Thursday afternoon lunch: a quinoa, arugula, avocado salad with baked pineapple and mustard dressing. I came back to South Congress with my friend who lives in Austin on Saturday and tried brown sugar dusted sweet potatoes fries from one of the food trucks. Both dishes were delicious.

New Mexico

After my time in Colorado, I spent a single day in New Mexico before heading to Austin, Texas. I left Pagosa Springs early last week Tuesday morning and pointed my wheels south. There had been a hard freeze during the night and Pagosa Springs was glazed in a jagged layer of ice. It made for a beautiful final morning in Colorado.

Once in New Mexico, I stopped first at a sign off the highway marking the Continental Divide and then again in Chama, New Mexico. Chama is a small town that was once a depot on the Cumbres-Toltec narrow-gauge railroad line. Although closed during the winter, in the summer tourists supposedly flock there to ride the still-operational rails. I wandered around Chama's old train station and stopped in the Trinity Cafe for a cup of coffee and breakfast sandwich. Green chili peppers are popular in New Mexico and even come standard on a breakfast sandwich. Keeping with the when-in-Rome mentality, I avoided my impulse to have the peppers on the side and was pleasantly surprised by the kick they added to the ham, egg, and cheese.

An hour or so of driving later, I was in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. Ojo Caliente is famous for its hot springs. There's a resort in the town that goes by the same name. Someone in Pagosa Springs had recommended the Ojo Caliente Hot Springs as a great place to check out and there I was. A day pass could be had for fifteen bucks so I decided to do it even though the lithia hot springs that I was really looking forward to trying was out of service.

Ojo Caliente has five or six major pools, each with different characteristics. My first stop was the 86 degree swimming pool. After a few laps, I took a dip in the arsenic pool. Although fatal when consumed, arsenic is apparently beneficial to skin and heals arthritis and ulcers. My next stop was the soda pool, an enclosed, echoing, steaming structure whose water have been known to aid in relaxation and digestion. 20 minutes later, I checked out the iron pool, a cliffside niche with a pebble floor that benefits the circulatory and immune systems. When I dug my feet into the pebbles of the iron pool I could feel superheated water from the springs deep below bubble up through the displaced rocks.

Even without the lithia spring (which I learned you drink out of as opposed to soaking in) I was totally satisfied with the Ojo Caliente springs. Besides me, its clientele was an odd mix of Europeans and the elderly. Nevertheless, the waters are unmatchable and I really do believe they have some kind of healing and meditative effect.

Santa Fe lies 50 miles south of Ojo Caliente. I arrived there in the early afternoon and first visited a Trader Joe's to stock up on snacks. I found Santa Fe's outskirts to be seedy and boxy, but the downtown of Santa Fe itself is a remarkable place. It's composed entirely of low-lying, adobe structures resulting in an architectural landscape foreign to anything I've seen before. The closest equivalent I could come up with the was Star Wars desert planet of Tatooine.

Downtown, Santa Fe has plazas and galleries and shops and statues (both ancient and modern) and feels like the expensive, artsy place it is. I strolled up and down a few of the mostly empty streets and stopped in a rock store before passing by the Cathedral of St. Francis di Assisi and the San Miguel Mission, the oldest church structure in the United States. The mission is a simple adobe building constructed by the Tlaxcalan Indians under Franciscan Padres in 1610. I spent the night an hour southeast of Santa Fe in Santa Rosa.

Home

I am now back in Washington, DC. That means my trip is over, but this blog is not. I still have to add details of my travels through New Mexico and Texas and then will likely have a few wrap-up entries.

I've also decided to keep this blog alive going forward if not with a discernible purpose. I don't have any adventures planned but I may periodically post dispatches (and pictures) from Washington, DC or wherever the road takes me.

Stay tuned...

Wolf Creek

I spent Monday night in Durango, Colorado then left for Wolf Creek Ski Area the next morning to go skiing. Wolf Creek is where all the locals I had talked to recommended I ski. They said it was the mountain with the most snow of anywhere in the state. I had also considered going to Purgatory, a resort near Durango, but the snow there wasn't as good (so said the locals) and a lift ticket was almost twice the price as at Wolf Creek.

The Wolf Creek slopes were fantastically empty on Monday and not once did I have to wait to ride the ski lift up the mountain. I hadn't been skiing for at least five or six years so I was slightly unsteady at first, but after a few green runs, I worked may way up to blue, then on to black, then back to blue. I don't particularly enjoy the steep, mogul-pocked black diamond runs, but there is a certain rush that comes with plummeting down a steep incline and trying to turn sharply on the snow mounds. I'm glad I tried a few. Many thanks to my dad for letting me use his ski gear!

That evening, I got a room at the Pinewood Inn in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, about 20 miles south of Wolf Creek. Pagosa Springs is known for its sulfur hot springs. There are three places in the town to soak, all clustered off the main street. Two of the venues charge $10 while one charges $20. The only place with a full parking lot was the pool that charged $20. Accepting the wisdom of crowds, this was the place I too selected.

I think I made the right choice. The Springs, as it was called, had over eighteen pools of varying sizes, styles, and temperatures. The pool area is adjacent to the San Juan River and there are steps offering soakers access to the river's chilly waters. (I dipped my hand into the river but did not immerse myself.) Other pools offer waterfalls or silt bottoms, some are silent respites while others are meant to be sociable.

Going from pool to pool, I tested what each had to offer. Just sitting back and looking up at the brilliant stars and thinking about how tiny a speck we are in the great, immense cosmos was pleasantly meditative although I also met with a nice, middle-aged couple from Nebraska and a group of friends from New Hampshire on a winding road trip much like myself.

I told one of the guys from New Hampshire about my adventures meeting presidential candidates in Iowa and asked him if he'd met any of the candidates stampeding through New Hampshire in preparation for that state's Tuesday primary. He hadn't, but he owned a paintball park and said he'd be willing to let the candidates compete in a paintball tournament there in lieu of yet another debate. What an exceptional idea.

Hot springs, I've decided, are quite worthwhile and enjoyable. I resolved to stop at another in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico containing lithium that one of the New Hampshire roadtrippers recommended. Maybe it's all mental, but after soaking I found myself researching the properties of various minerals. Unlike after going swimming in chlorine-drenched pools when especially in winter the water makes my skin dry and itchy, the hot springs didn't dehydrate my skin and I think actually improved my complexion (although I cannot empirically be sure).