Category Archives: New Mexico

Somehow I missed really visiting Albuquerque’s Old Town during previous visits, dismissing it as too touristy and a pale imitation of Santa Fe’s old plaza area. My bad. Wandering around the small pocket of oldness dominated by a huge adobe San Felipe de Neri Church (Spanish Colonial, 1793) in the central plaza, past adobe buildings dating from 1870 to 1900, we found some touristy place but also fun shops with local crafts and goods including (thanks to a recent Travel and Leisure mag story): Tiny Grocer ABQ, a little hole-in-the-wall stuffed with local meat, jalapeño hot sauce, baked goodies, homemade soups; The silver artichoke, selling jewelry made with turquoise and a lovely orange shell from Mexico by a mother-son duo; Nizohoni Soap – run by a young woman born in the Great Navajo Nation (ship rock, NM) that sells products with resonant names such as “REZ dirt soap,” “blue corn Pollen lip scrub,” “piñon pine needle foam wash” and “Navajo Sage and Wild Rose Chi’shie Oil w/Eucalyptus”; and Back Alley Bruhas, a fun boutique with vintage and locally designed clothing, jewelry and home goods.

From a historical marker in the plaza I learned that ABQ was even harder to spell in olden days: AlbuRquerque. We also wandered down one courtyard in Old Town and ended up in the sculpture garden next to the Albuquerque Museum.

The weather is warming! It was around 60 as we walked Millie around the Rio Grande Nature Center, and I mean around since we learned the center itself doesn’t allow dogs. We ended up on a nice length of the River shaded by cottonwood trees where the only other visitors were birds.

Heading north on Rio Grande (the street not the river), We found one big southwestern estate after another, huge houses set back from the street, surrounded by long fields and often a stable. Moneyland, ABQ style.

Other ABQ finds:

Ikhatov Bread & coffee, new Nob hill bakery, Good egg salad sandwich, Quiche, kakawa (Santa fe) hot chocolate.

Takeout brisket tacos from Casa Azule.

Fantastic special occasion meal (dirck’s belated bday, my signing with a literary agency, early Valentine’s Day at Farm and Table. Trout with crunchy flavor packed quinoa (how does that happen?); pork chop with a savory sauce, even the bread was delicious. (Discovered a good dry cider from Michigan — Rose co-op 39

Snow. Blowing snow. Bitter cold. Is this Iowa? No it’s New Mexico. At least it’s very pretty and the low temperature in Albuquerque today was the high temp in Des Moines. We shelved any hiking and looked for indoor activities. The Albuquerque Museum fit the bill, an airy contemporary building with an appealingly eclectic collection of New Mexican contemporary art and a new show on Indigo Textiles from around the world, something I fell for hard when we visited Kyoto, Japan awhile back. And during Covid 2021 I took a Zoom class in Shibori Indigo tie dying from the Des Moines art center. The Albuquerque show features textiles from Asia, South America, the U.S., vintage and contemporary, utilitarian and artwork. I loved a collection of giant-sized indigo-dyed costumes on display, accompanied by a video of the costumes worn by men on stilts, who danced and pranced in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The locals’ expressions: priceless.

Back in the Sawmill District, we wandered around Spur Line Supply Co., a cavernous high-design space with cool furniture, home goods, clothing, paper products, some local, by New Mexicans, but others by small batch makers elsewhere, including Des Moines’ Moglea, a letterpress studio that makes irresistible handmade notebooks, stationary and cards. (The ABQ museum gift shop also sold Moglea notebooks. Who knew?)

Lunch was at Vinaigrette (which has a mean vegan mushroom stew/soup…fyi, my dear reader Charlotte) to celebrate Dirck’s 65th birthday. We were supposed to have dinner with dirck’s sibs at Farm and Table but we got snowed out. There’s not much snow by midwestern standards. A few inches. But the roads are slick with ice and the cold wind is harsh.

We found a new (to us) pocket of coolness in Albuquerque, a city we have chosen to ride out February in, living in a half-finished yet lovely adobe-style house next door to dirck’s sister and brother-in-law (who own the house we are bunking in.) The Sawmill District is dominated by the huge and super trendy Sawmill Market, a well-designed and lively food hall in a former, you guessed it, sawmill. I had excellent Vietnamese food and dirck had designer tacos, sitting outdoors in an industrial chic courtyard.

Across the street are trendized warehouse-looking buildings now housing an enormous mineral shop and another made-by-locals place. But we were blown away by the Hotel Chaco, dramatically designed to look like and pay tribute to area pueblos and Chaco Canyon, with a round high-ceilinged entryway, rugged materials and cutting-edge contemporary art by “Native American New Mexico artists.” The top floor restaurant we’re told has spectacular views of the mountains, buttes and plateau.

Today we had fast and tasty middle eastern food at Chello and then walked along the muddy Rio Grande on the dirt paths of the Bosque Trail (Bosque means forest in Spanish) stopping at a pond to bird watch.