Karen and I left very early that morning, locking up the house and heading to the nearly bakery to grab some coffee and cinnamon rolls for a in-car breakfast. The rolls were hot and steaming gently on the dashboard, their cap of white frosting still soft and rolling down the sides of the fragrant curl of pastry. I pulled off bits for my friend as she steered through the city towards the expressway, singing softly with the radio as we drove along. We were headed out of town, out of the state on vacation for about a week, with our usual pact of ‘no newspapers, no TV, no work-related anything’ firmly in place.
I had flown in from London a few days before and she had been working harder than ever to clear time for a holiday and we were both a little punchy – me, from a slight loss of blood, having chopped the top of my finger off the previous evening when I was stripping corn off the cob sitting on the sofa of her living room. The trail of darkening red spots all over the house as I ran around looking for something to stop the bleeding would have put a CSI team into overtime and now I sported a brilliantly fluorescent bandaid over the end of the digit and held it determinedly apart from my other fingers, like something out of Star Trek on a bad alien day.
Undaunted though not unshaken, we were on our way to New Mexico, to see how the ‘other Indian’ lived. Our first stop would be Taos, where we had booked space in a hacienda that promised to be picturesque and still comfortable and affordable. As we wound through the Rockies across state lines, we found the vista gradually changing. Rough rocks and sharp edges gave way to violet-blue undulations of sagebrush carpeting softer contours of desert land. Far on the left of where we drove along the sand-swirled road rose the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where, legend has it, the blood of Christ colours the rocks even today. Huge sand dunes piled along the foothills in the famous national monument.
Suddenly, we were there. Taos scrolled its length in front of us as we came through two hills and into the ‘valley’, well known as a ski resort and artists’ town. We located our hotel and checked in, charmed by the blue-painted door set into adobe walls. Terracotta tiled floors led us into our room, a pretty twin, with what had to be the smallest bathroom I have ever squeezed myself into with the lowest water pressure I have ever tried to bathe in. If you sat on the potty, you mashed your knees into the door, while to see yourself in the mirror over the basin, you had to get into a strange semi-crouching sideways tangle, with your feet in the shower stall and your nose squashed against the cabinet.
But we were young and eager to see more and in the mood for adventure and it was all just that: a great adventure. In the early evening we wandered into the small town, not too far from where we were staying, and sat down to a feast of tortilla soup – which tasted rather like old newspaper in dishwater, to be honest – lashings of lemony guacamole with blue corn chips and enchiladas bathed in delightfully piquant chile. That was perhaps the night I discovered my body’s aversion to avocados, even though at that time we firmly believed that it was my resident amoeba that was doing mischief rather than what I put in my stomach that did me in. I staggered agonisedly through the rest of the evening, which was a fabulous melange of music, dance and light and sound.
And my rather blurred memories of that and more in New Mexico I will continue with another day, another blog…
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