Go West to Santa Fe

​Travels to Santa Fe, N.M. We arrived at the Santa Fe airport. It was no surprise that the airport was small since I had done my research. We exited the plane and walked download the outside ramp to the tarmac, crossed to the back door of the airport where we waited in a small cramped room to retrieve our suitcases from a conveyor belt. The belt resembled one at Sam’s Club or Costco for your groceries and was not any bigger. After retrieving our luggage, we proceeded down a hallway, turned, and went out the front door of the building to a tiny parking lot. Outside we viewed the uninterrupted sea of brown and orange barren land with mountains on the horizon.

After a 30 or forty-minute drive with our personal driver Lynn Arteaga (https://luckypigassistant.com/), who had been recommended by the hotel manager where we would be staying, we arrived at the Drury Hotel in downtown Santa Fe.

The “City Different” is appropriately named. I was smart enough to know when traveling to a desert city with wide open areas, that there is no quick and easy public transportation like taxis. Unlike when traveling to New York, where you only have to hail a cab at a curb. However, all my research gave multiple choices of transportation including tour buses, Uber drivers, and pedicabs. Unfortunately, we would soon learn that they did not exist. The common response was a collective, “No there is no transportation resources, not since COVID.”

​I had planned a non-walking, easy-going vacation, which was a new experience for us. Most of our vacations consisted of walking for 8 or 10 hours a day. We were looking forward to a less strenuous vacation but little did we know not all carefully planned trips go as arranged. The first sentence on our “trip-to-remember” which should have been a clue of impending doom was, “Don’t worry, Santa Fe is very walkable.” Hold on to your hats, folks, when you hear, “Don’t worry,” and understand that the time has begun to start worrying.

What remained to be our next surprise was the plans for traveling to other cities we planned to go to and were an hour or two drive out from Santa Fe into the desert. The results from two months of research led me to scratch the need to rent a car, and with my trusty list of tour buses and public transportation (the Blue Line and the Chili Line) as backup, what was there to worry about? Note to self: The travel publications were the same ones that listed Uber and Pedicabs. Still, we had made it to the “City Different” and I had faith and so, our adventure had begun. 

Stay tune for more about are adventures in New Mexico.