Santa Fe Travel Diary

Word Pictures #7 from Santa Fe

by Mike Clay

Dogs in Pickup Trucks

Santa Fe is a great place to explore. A drive up the Taos highway, north from town, gave us a chance to see the mountain grandeur in all four directions. We went to Espanola, drove around the small town, and crossed the Rio Grande. The water was swift and the inner tubing groups were out in full array. We remembered multicolored hills of differing shades of brown and orange on previous trips but this time they were green. The El Nino was in full force in New Mexico and it had rained a good bit more than their usual summer average.

We like to send postcards back home to our friends. We had done our usual postcard writing one evening and the next morning went by the Post Office downtown to mail our postcards. This is a real interesting and time-consuming thing to do. The Postal facility is in one of those old imposing Federal buildings and traffic on the one-way, two-lane street was in four lanes, double parked, speeding, and honking horns. Many of the sport utility vehicles had at least one dog inside and some of the trucks had dogs in the back. The people all looked busy and in a hurry. We weren’t going anywhere in particular. We enjoyed the people watching.