🎈From Balloons to Burritos🌯

Have you seen the show Breaking Bad?!?! If not, I highly recommend (it's intense but the acting and storyline is 🤌). If yes - picture the iconic Walter in his underwear scene. Dusty, tumbleweeds, barren land except for flat top mountains in the distance. Every house and business (even McD's & Starbucks) are Adobe style architecture creating a beige blanket amongst the sienna desert landscape. This is New Mexico to a T.

What Breaking Bad didn't portray was the rich infusion of Native American, Spanish and Mexican cultures. Absolutely incredible and beautiful - from petroglyphs on the sides of mountains left by ancient Indigenous peoples to Ofrendas glowing in the windows of many homes during Dia de los Muertos. There are Hatch Chile roasting tents on the roadsides every couple blocks. Speaking of which - New Mexicans LOVE their chiles...their license plates have chiles on them and there are dried chile Ristras hanging in front of most front doors for good luck. Almost every restaurant asks you "red or green?" when ordering a savory breakfast item, which threw us off the first couple of times ordering. Red or green salsa made from roasted red or green Hatch Chiles - which to my very Midwest palate were more hot sauces than salsas because 🔥🚨🔥

The art here is incredible as well, some of the most unique pieces I've ever seen. There are beautiful murals on the sides of most buildings (I guess beige color on everything does create a perfect canvas!). There is such a range of media use too - my favorite being the very frequent use of turquoise rock in jewelry and metal works. Ceramic "Hacienda" style tilework in bright colors lies inside many buildings as well - lending a stark contrast to the otherwise neutral tones.

THE FOOD. THEEEE FOOOOODDDDD. Specifically the Mexican food, duh - but really everything we had here was just SO GOOD. Someone in Denver told us that the food quality in Albuquerque is so good - obviously because of the culture, but also the cost of owning a restaurant is significantly lower so it attracts chefs and niche restaurant owners. Best taco I've ever had - El Parasol roadside stand in Española (which by the way was specifically recommended to us by a New Mexico native who we happened to run into at a bar on our last night in Portland, Maine a few months ago). Literally just a handmade corn tortilla, steak, lettuce, fresh shredded cheddar. My mouth is watering *opens DoorDash app*.

Okay, okay - i probably should stop gushing about the art and culture and tell you a little about what we got up to during our 2 month stay in "Duke City" (Albuquerque). I think a list form is the best method here because Mr. Dan Frey packed our weekends with all of the activities😉

• International Balloon Fiesta - this is ultimately the reason we came to Albuquerque and got an Air BnB less than 5 minutes from the festival grounds. 600+ hot air balloons lifting off from one area is a sight to be seen. It is THE most photographed event in the world apparently and has been on my bucketlist for years. What we didn't realize (or maybe we did and just ignored because it was painful) was that hot air balloons typically fly in the morning. Not 8 or 9... 6am, 7am, etc. What we also didn't realize is that hot air balloon flying is super finnicky and dependent on the weather. The slightest inkling of a breeze and they are grounded. We hauled ourselves out of bed at 3:30a two times and sat in -hours- of traffic (despite being only a mile away) to attempt to see a mass ascension (all 600 balloons lifting off at once), both of which were grounded because of weather. 😅They did inflate and light up for everyone for a short time though, so that was cool.... We also went at night once to see them inflate and glow again, but got torrential down poured on immediately upon walking through the gates. After all of that effort, it turned out that we got the best views of the balloons in the air from our Air BnB!

• Very Large Array (VLA) - Space nerds UNITE! Dan and I were foaming at the mouth to see the VLA. I made him watch Contact the weekend before. It was a 2 hour drive to and from, and when we say it's in the middle of nowhere - it's in the middle of nowhere. When you get on the property you are required to power off all electronic devices to prevent interference. These guys are bigger than you expect and they move alot! So much fun and incredible to witness (even though it was disappointing that they don't actually look for extraterrestrials using these).

• Taos & Santa Fe - Cute little towns full of art! Taos is a ski village and art hub with a very traditional Spanish influenced town square. Santa Fe is similar, only quite a bit larger and closer to Albuquerque.

• Roswell - 3 hour drive to and from Albuquerque, and felt like the most remote area we've ever been in. Only two very small villages to drive through in that entire 3 hours. Once in Roswell, I swear the X-Files theme song immediately started in my head and I couldn't stop pointing at innocent pedestrians and asking Dan if they're an alien. The town really leans into its "alien history" with a space-ship shaped McDonald's, alien holding the Dunkin' sign, and little green men at the front of every storefront. We went to the UFO Research Museum to read about the town history. We knew this would be kitschy, but I severely regret leaving my tinfoil hat at home. One of the researchers gave a talk while we were there - ex-military civil engineer who claims to only base his research on facts. His entire life work (and the whole schtick with Roswell and aliens) revolves around secondhand verbal accounts of the events that happened after a farmer found metal debris in his field in 1947 and said it "didn't look like the normal weather balloon" he was used to cleaning up. This spiraled into multiple conspiracies of a government coverup all the way up to President Truman, murder of multiple witnesses that claimed they saw creatures being removed from the debris field, and more.... It's a lot - but it was really fun and silly (no offense to people who believe it?) and there were alien themed knick-knacks galore!

• Ruidoso and Cloudcroft - Dan writing this bit! The disc golf around Albuquerque was pretty...subpar (and that's not a disc golf term). I took a 2 day/1 night trip in search of the best disc golf in New Mexico, and likely found it in the Sierra Blanca mountains in the south-central part of the state. While there I played the four highest-rated courses in New Mexico, plus three others. The top two were fantastic, but #3 and #4 unfortunately suffered from a lack of maintenance. Still, it was a wonderful little mini-getaway for me and it was surprising to see the mountainous terrain with tons of trees - so different from the beige high desert that covers so much of the state. En route, I also stopped at a roadside marker near the Trinity site - where the first atomic bomb test took place. Okay back to Corinne!

There were a few other trips and activities throughout our stay too, but those were the general highlights. Overall, while this is not a place we would live long term (I need water!), we absolutely love the culture and unique environment and have absolutely no regrets on this part of our trip. Our Air BnB was also adobe style with skylights and a little private patio with fig and pomegranate trees - so we got a ton of Vitamin D and fresh air. Absolutely heaven! We will definitely miss it here but on to the next stop... Arizona!