Hello from Santa Fe! We made it finally. It was one long-ass drive. Google maps told us it would be about 23 hours driving. Including our various stops (none of them too long), we drove for 14.5 hours the first day and 14 or 15 hours the second day. We had sunny or almost sunny weather the whole way, but we also had a problem with the wind for a lot of the trip, which is part of why it took us so much longer than google predicted. When it thought we would be driving 70 or 75, we were often driving 60. There was some very nice scenery on our drive, and a lot of it had snow! There was snow on the ground just about the whole way between The Dalles, Oregon and New Mexico. I put a bunch of photos on my gallery, and you’ll be able to see that even though we didn’t do any extra sight-seeing, we saw some pretty cool things just from the highway! I enjoyed all the various cliffs, rocks and mesas that we saw.

We spent the night after our first day driving in a little town called Trementon, Utah. It was an arbitrary choice, other than we were really tired. We checked in at the office, and the lady working there had lived in Oregon City back in the day when she was a figure skater at the Clackamas Town Center. That was weird. Very random. We went to find some breakfast the next day in the next town over, Brigham City. Spencer found some coffee in the grocery store, but we couldn’t find any coffeeshops, including Starbucks, in the whole downtown area. We presumed it was because that was an area with lots of Mormon residents, and Mormons don’t drink caffeine. So after a night of very little and crappy sleep, I didn’t have any tea or mochas in the morning, and that was a bit rough.

We kept on, and there are some very cool things to see in southeast Utah. For a while I’ve been wanting to visit Arches National Park, and we drove right past it! We could see it off in the distance. Hopefully we’ll be able to visit it sometime. The rocks near there and Moab, Utah were particularly cool. The least pretty and enjoyable part of our drive was the part through Colorado. We were only in Colorado for about two hours, but we didn’t see much other than really poor, run-down tiny towns all covered in junk. Oh—I take that back. The mesas we saw (cool) were in Colorado. So it wasn’t all bad.

We saw a some wildlife on our way down. Here is the list:
*two bald eagles
*one big-horned sheep (standing majestically on a rock ledge looking out over the Columbia)
*hawks
*magpies
*ravens
*three elk
*six deer
*two feral dogs chewing on a skeleton of a large animal
*two golden eagles

I was very excited to see the big-horned sheep. It was surprising too because it was really close to The Dalles, and I wouldn’t have expected to see something like that right there. It was also hanging out with some cows.

Our house in Santa Fe is pretty great! The photo above is of a little nook in the hallway wall. It's my favorite part of the house. When we got here, someone from the rental company had come during the day and left the lights, heat, and soft music on for us! That was pretty crazy, and pleasant. Also, it seemed to us like the floor (which is brick) was heated. That blew our minds, but unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to turn that feature on since then. Also, our house is adobe, like almost all of the houses here, and it’s amazingly insulative. The temperature is very constant inside, compared to what we’re used to, particularly the basement in Bamfield (which was extreme in the other way, of course). It’s easy to understand why people build (and have for a long time) their houses out of this stuff! Max has seemed to adjust to the new house quickly, which is nice. We don’t have a yard though, unfortunately. We can let him run around just up the street at a park and open area, and we can walk around town. We live in a condo compound, but we don’t seem to have very many other neighbors. There are three houses right here together with ours, but no one is living in them right now. Most of the other houses are much larger and fancier, and many of them have a view of town. So we’re in this great place, and it’s the runt of the litter here! Funny.

We are adjusting to the different climate here. First, it’s very dry. Our clothes are static-y, and our noses are a bit unhappy. Today is the first time at the end of the day that my throat isn’t dry and sore. Spencer has become a regular chapstick user (as I have always been). Our bathroom doesn’t have a fan, and dries out after just a little while with the window open after showering. The altitude change (we’re at 7000 feet here) hasn’t been as difficult to deal with as I imagined, but I am easily winded when walking up hills that normally aren’t any problem for me. Also, I have had many headaches since we got here. Yesterday we had pasta for dinner, and I tested some when it should have been almost ready, but it was hardly cooked at all! We remembered later that it takes things longer to cook at altitude. That’s for sure!

Today we got the rest of our stuff cleaned up and put away, which was good. We had to do a lot of work on that yesterday. This place is furnished, but there isn’t really any room for tenants to bring anything! There is only one closet, the bedroom closet, so that’s not much room for storage of the boxes we brought. Also, it was half full already with a fan and air conditioner. The kitchen cupboards were also already mostly full, so we did quite a bit of rearranging in order to make space for our food. The other thing that was a challenge for us was that there was no obvious or good place for us to set up computers, or even one computer. We had to buy a cheap desk and rearrange the furniture in the living room for my working area, and we hoisted up a short table in the bedroom onto the action packer boxes to make a desk for Spencer. We moved stuff around so much that I took photos beforehand so that we know how to put it back the way it was when we move out.

Today we also went for a walk around downtown, which is just a couple blocks away from our house. It turns out that downtown Santa Fe is very, very touristy and full of art galleries and stores. We only saw a couple of restaurants and cafes. But we saw an old church, which is the oldest church in the U.S., built in 1610, and the oldest house in the U.S. We didn’t see what year the house was built, but Spencer thinks it was 17-something. I will go see the inside of the old church sometime while we’re here. So we didn’t find the downtown area very impressive, and it’s a little disappointing that we didn’t find cafes and restaurants that we were interested in going to, just a short walk from our house. We hope to learn from the locals about where we should eat this week as Spencer gets to know people at the institute. Maybe there will be something nearby that we just didn’t see today. That would be cool.

So that’s about what has happened in the last couple of days. We’re happy to be here and I hope we enjoy our time in this very new and different place for us.