Arrival in Albuquerque
Thursday, October 26, 2023: We arrived in Albuquerque too early to check into our Airbnb, so we drove around checking out the old Route 66 signs. We stopped at El Vado Motel, which opened in 1937 and was one of the first to greet Route 66 travelers. The Plaza, an event space in the motel’s courtyard, hosts local musicians and art markets in summer. There is a taproom, small eateries and a coffee shop.
We then moved into our Airbnb on 11th Street. Sadly, it wasn’t nearly as nice as the Airbnbs we enjoyed in Santa Fe and Taos. We enjoyed vodka tonics and crackers with pimiento cheese next to the fountain on the patio, then we went for dinner at Asian Noodle Bar. We had our usual sake and Sapporo, accompanied by egg rolls. I had Lad Na with Shrimp and Mike had Thai Tom Yum. My fortune cookie revealed this: “We must overcome difficulties rather than be overcome by them.” I find fortunes these days don’t really predict the future but impart some kind of wisdom or advice.
After dinner we drove down by the University of New Mexico and Nob Hill, checking out the Old Route 66 vibes and neon signs.
Steps: 6,389; Miles: 2.71. Drove 180.4 miles. Weather Albuquerque: Hi 73°, Lo 47°. Sunny.
A hike on Sandia Peak
Friday, October 27: Our first morning in Albuquerque, we drove to the Sandia Peak Tramway, where we were zipped up by Swiss-made cables for 2.7 miles, or 4,000 feet in elevation, to Sandia Crest, the highest point of the Sandia Mountains (10,273 feet). The Tramway takes about 15 minutes and at the top the temperature is about 20 degrees colder than Albuquerque.
We walked along the ridgeline on the Crest Trail (# 130) for about 2 hours and 40 minutes. We saw amazing views of Albuquerque, situated in the Rio Grande basin within the Rio Grande Rift, a zone of faults that has formed basins and ranges from southern Colorado into Mexico. This rift is five miles deep, one of the greatest troughs on earth. It was a gorgeous day for a stunning walk.
The Kiwanis cabin in the photos below was built in the summer of 1936 by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) in an architectural style known as the “Rustic Aesthetic.” It was also meant to reflect early Pueblo building traditions. This standard guided the design of many American Park and Recreation buildings in the 1930s. The goal was to create buildings from rough, unfinished local materials which blended with their physical, historical and cultural surroundings.
The crews collected local limestone for construction of both the cabin and the road embankments. Large slabs were made for the cabin by driving two-man crowbars into rock crevices with sledgehammers. One or two men then swung on the bar to crack off flat sections of the soft stone. These were hefted by hand onto the flatbed truck and hauled to the cabin site.
The CCC men learned as they worked. While building the cabin, Forest Service technicians trained the men in masonry skills. As road crews hauled rocks to the site, the young masons sized and shaped the stones by hand before setting them in concrete mortar. Besides the cabin, the men of the CCC improved the Crest and Ellis Loop roads; built bridges and hung miles of telephone lines; planted trees; cleared campgrounds; developed ski runs, towers and lodges; and searched for lost hikers.
Here are some views of our tram ride down the Peak.
Tinkertown Museum
After hiking the Sandia Peak trail, we drove to Tinkertown Museum, founded by artist Ross Ward, a carnival and circus painter. The museum features Ward’s hand-carved miniature Old West town (Tinkertown), which he started carving in 1962, as well as a hand-carved 3-ring circus, a collection of antique wedding cake toppers, tools, vintage signs and other oddities. Many of the displays can be brought to life by feeding quarters into slots. Ward built much of the museum building himself, out of more than 50,000 glass bottles held together by concrete.
Here are a few tidbits from the automated displays at Tinkertown.
Ward was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in February 1998, and, since it was unsafe for him to drive, he began converting his Jeep Cherokee (on display at the museum) into an art piece covered in pennies and bottle caps. Ward passed away from Alzheimer’s disease in 2002 at the age of 62.
A film crew from Sopapilla Productions was there talking with employees and Ross Ward’s widow, Carla Ward. They stopped me and wanted to know why I’d come to Tinkertown. I said that as soon as I’d read about it, I was determined to see it when we came to Albuquerque. After we finished walking around the outdoor grounds, we met Carla Ward and Mike took a photo of us together.
On our way back to our Airbnb from Tinkertown, we stopped in Cedar Crest to take a few photos of Burger Boy. Apparently it has one of the state’s best chile cheeseburgers, but we didn’t stop for that. The paintings of the founding owner, Green Chili Bill, were done by Ross Ward, the artist who created Tinkertown. Burger Boy also has that Route 66 vibe to it.
Tomasita’s
Later, after showering and relaxing a bit at our Airbnb, we went out to dinner at Tomasita’s. Of course, I had to have CHILE RELLENOS, while Mike enjoyed CHALUPAS . It was a great way to end our first day in Albuquerque.
Steps: 13,379. Miles 5.67. Drove 88.1 miles. Weather (Albuquerque) Hi 73°, Lo 48°. (Sandia Peak Hi 67°, Lo 42°). Sunny.
Old Town Albuquerque
Saturday, October 28: Our second day in Albuquerque, we went to the Old Town after stopping at the Palms Trading Company to peruse the New Mexican silver and turquoise jewelry. The Old Town is a labyrinth of old adobe buildings that are now mostly clothing and souvenir galleries. This day, the New Mexicans were out in force celebrating Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a weeklong celebration from October 28-November 4. We happened to be here on the first day of the celebration, and there was a line of old trucks decorated to the hilt with memorabilia honoring deceased family members. It was a festive atmosphere, and we just happened to luck out being here at this time.
We visited the San Felipe de Neri Church, established on the west side of the plaza in 1706. When it basically melted in the rainy season of 1792, it was replaced on the north side of the plaza with walls made of adobe-like terrones (sun-dried bricks cut from sod) which are more than 5 feet thick. Masses here are conducted three times a day, once in Spanish.
In the late 19th century, Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe added his European touches to the church, including wooden folk Gothic spires. Jesuit priests from Naples added more non-Spanish details.
Albuquerque Museum
After our wanders around Old Town Albuquerque, we went to the Albuquerque Museum. Outdoors in the sculpture garden, we admired the sculptures of “Sonny” Rivera and Betty Sabo, “La Jornada,” which commemorated 400 years since the arrival of the Spanish settlers and their families in what is now New Mexico. Sabo and Rivera worked together to create depictions of a few of the original 400 men (130 of whom brought families), 83 wagons and carts, and over 7,000 stock animals who arrived in New Mexico in 1598.
Inside the museum, we perused the exhibit titled “O’Keeffe and Moore.” The exhibition juxtaposed the works of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Henry Moore (1898-1986), artists who approached Modernism through the use of natural forms. Both artists relocated from urban centers to rural locations with open landscapes. They both amassed vast personal collections of animal skulls, bones, gnarled driftwood, stones and coiled seashells, which inspired some of their most important creations.
Below are some of O’Keeffe’s creations.
Henry Moore’s sculptures were interspersed throughout the gallery.
At the heart of the exhibit were recreations of both artists’ studios, featuring their original found objects, furnishings and tools.
I was fascinated by the recreation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio at Ghost Ranch, about 60 miles from Santa Fe, using the original furnishings and objects from her studio from around 1946. She began regular visits to New Mexico in 1929 and acquired Ghost Ranch in 1940. In 1945, she acquired her other home and studio in Abiquiú, about 15 miles from Ghost Ranch. She settled there permanently in 1949 and for decades lived and worked seasonally in both Ghost Ranch (summer and autumn) and Abiquiú (winter and spring). For more about the artist’s Abiquiú home, you can see my earlier post: the landscapes of georgia o’keeffe.
Below are some photos of the recreation of Henry Moore’s studio. Moore settled in Hoglands, a farmhouse partially dating to the 15th century, surrounded by sheep fields in Perry Green, a tiny hamlet an hour from London in rural Hertfordshire. This became his home during the Blitz in 1941 and he remained there until his death in 1986. There Moore maintained several studios, most converted from agricultural sheds or barns, one for each medium of his working practice: a drawing studio; a carving studio; a graphics studio; an enlargement studio; the Plastic Studio for working on plasters in natural light; the Top Studio, which was used for his pre-1970s work – patination of bronzes and photography; and finally the Bourne Maquette Studio, named for the creek that wound through the grounds. It was this last studio, where Moore worked routinely from the 1970s and where he housed his collection of found objects and plaster maquettes, that was created here with its original contents.
The two artists met only once that is documented, during Moore’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in December 1946. O’Keeffe’s solo exhibition had taken place there in May of that same year.
Although many critics and observers over the years have suggested that many of O’Keeffe’s paintings were sexual in nature, O’Keeffe didn’t care for his interpretation and vehemently denied she had any intention of depicting the female anatomy.
There were other permanent exhibits at the museum. We especially enjoyed “Common Ground: Art in New Mexico.” It relates continuities in the southwest from Native American traditions to European aesthetics from colonial Spanish and Mexican settlers, to diverse contemporary aesthetic explorations.
In the photo gallery below, the painting “My Three Fates” by Dorothy Brett shows three women at a kitchen table who represent Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frieda Lawrence, and a self portrait of Dorothy Brett (the artist). Outside sitting against a tree is English writer D.H. Lawrence, who visited Taos first in 1923 at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan and returned to London to recruit friends to move to Taos. Dorothy Brett was the only person, besides Lawrence’s wife Frieda, who took up the invitation to create a utopian society he called “Ranamin.”
Random Albuquerque
We returned to the Old Town to do some more shopping. We continued to enjoy scenes of Día de Los Muertos.
We took a drive to capture more of the Route 66 vintage signs along the old road.
The last photo is the KiMo Theatre. From its website: “The KiMo Theatre, a Pueblo Deco picture palace, opened on September 19, 1927. Pueblo Deco was a flamboyant, short-lived architectural style that fused the spirit of the Native American cultures of the Southwest with the exuberance of Art Deco. Pueblo Deco appeared at a time when movie-mad communities were constructing film palaces based on exotic models such as Moorish mosques and Chinese pavilions.”
For our last meal in Albuquerque, we went to Duran’s Central Pharmacy and sat on the swiveling diner stools for Duran’s Green Chile Cheeseburgers. What a classic place to end our time in New Mexico.
After our dinner at Duran Central Pharmacy, Mike took a walk on his own around our Albuquerque neighborhood and took some pictures in the beautiful waning light.
The next morning, Mike would fly home so he could be at work Monday morning and I packed up the Toyota RAV to begin my four day solo drive home.
Steps: 5,620. Miles 2.38. Drove 12.7 miles. Weather Hi 74°, Low 42°. Sunny.
~ wander.essence ~ 
You must be logged in to post a comment.