Life Over Tech in Santa Fe and Beyond

So it seems I haven’t had a minute to blog in the last couple weeks, mainly from being too busy with “real” life—as opposed to the virtual world we often live in these days—in a visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the oldest and coolest cities in the Southwest. We stayed at the El Rey Inn (here), our fourth time in a year, and it’s one of the truly hippest hotels: a renovated and well-kept old-fashioned motor court on the legendary Route 66, with beautiful landscaping, two hot tubs and a pool, great breakfast, and just a short drive from downtown. What we do in Santa Fe is eat killer Mexican food, too, with our favorite places being The Shed, right in the heart of old town, and El Farrolitos, which has to be one of the greatest odd spot restaurants in the country, in the tiny town of El Rito, north of Santa Fe, which vies for best food honors with the famous Rancho Chamayo. I’m hardly any foodist, but after eating at these places, you know what they mean by “Jesus wept.”
And I do have two books I’m reading right now, both good, that I’ll comment about shortly: Kent Haruf’s new novel, Benediction (2013), and Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (2012). But in the meantime, we also camped at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, north of Alamosa, Colorado, where my six-year-old climbed to the top of the highest dune (650′, at about 8,000 feet in elevation), on the windiest day, like an intrepid explorer. Here she is, caught with a Sony Nex-7 camera set on ‘poster’ mode: