Where: Los Suenos RV Park (Santa Fe, NM)
When:  Monday December 27 to Thursday December 30, 2021 (three nights)
Cost:  $ 155.85 + electric (three nights)
Bucket List:  Meow Wolf
Beer: Bosque Brewing

As Midwesterners, we were excited to head south for the winter for the first time.  Santa Fe looked like a good stop along the way from Missouri to our final destination in Arizona.  However, Santa Fe sits in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain foothills of New Mexico and has four distinct seasons.  We were greeted with a little snowfall upon our arrival.  

Where we Stayed: Los Suenos RV Park

We were only in Santa Fe for a few days so we decided to stay at Los Suenos RV Park, which is centrally located in the city, but several minutes to downtown. The RV park is next a commerical strip of businesses and is a basic no-frills RV Park.

We weren’t really concerned about WHERE we were staying, but instead were focoused on the TEMPERATURES. This was THE FIRST SNOW we had ever encountered in the RV. We filled our fresh water tank prior to parking the RV, and did not otherwise connect the water or sewer.  We also brought along some heat tape to help keep the wet bay from freezing over.   We supplemented the propane furnace with a couple of space heaters. This was also our first time where our RV park, Los Suenos RV Park, charged an electric fee based on metered usage so we were curious to see how much we would use. We averaged around $5/day with our space heaters. 

Getting through our first snow in the RV was a milestone. If we could survive that, we felt pretty unstoppable.

Art at the Santa Fe Community College

The Santa Fe Community College (“SFCC”) is located a short distance from the RV park. Our first stop at the college was to see Ethyl The Whale, an 82-foot life-sized sculpture of a blue whale constructed of recycled plastic trash.   The whale signifies the negative impact plastics have on our environment. Every nine minutes, the weight of a real whale – about 300,000 pounds  — is discharged into in the ocean.  The plastic also represents one person’s plastic trash by age 20.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California commissioned the sculpture but it was relocated to Santa Fe in 2019.   The artists who made it spent more than five months hand recycling more than 4,000 pounds of plastic trash to create the whale. 

The SFCC campus is also home to haiku rock pathway in is main courtyard.  There was not a soul around because of the holiday break and cold weather.  As such, we were able to spend about 20 minutes reading aloud some of the poems – which were quite humorous at times.  As someone who enjoys gardening, one of my favorites was:

Without weeds
What kind
Of Garden?
~John Brandi

We quickly learned that this haiku rock garden did not always follow the 7-5-7 syllable count. Naturally, we also got a pretty good chuckle out of this poem:

Counting Syllables
I haven’t heard
A word you said
~Miriam Sagan

 Loretto Chapel (spoiler: it’s NOT a Church!)

While we enjoyed learning about Ethyl the Whale and entertaining ourselves at the haiku pathway, we quickly learned we didn’t want many more outdoor activities because of the cold.   That put a damper on our plans to stroll around the downtown Santa Fe and explore the Canyon Roads Arts District, especially in the evenings when the temperatures would be even colder.  We therefore just drove around downtown in our warm and toasty Jeep.

One tourist attraction that I wanted to see was the Loretto Chapel Staircase.   In the 1880s, the sisters of the chapel needed a way to get to the choir loft.  They prayed for nine days to St. Joseph, the Patron Saint of Carpenters.  On the final prayer day, an unidentified carpenter appeared and constructed the stair case out of a rare wood not native to the area (probably spruce) using just wooden pegs and glue (no nails or other fasteners).  

The 20-foot tall staircase is helix-shaped insofar as it includes two complete 360 degree turns with no center structural pole (newel) so that entire weight of the staircase rests on the bottom stair.   The banisters were added approximately later ten years because the staircase was hard to climb without them.  Brackets were later added to provide structural support, but they actually damaged the staircase because they obstructed the spring-like movement of the staircase when in use.

After paying the $5/person admission fee, we entered the chapel and marveled at the staircase.  We did have to imagine what it would have looked like when it was first built and did not include the banisters or supports.   A pre-recorded narrator told the story of the chapel and the staircase while organ music is piped throughout.   We saw a few folks praying near the front of the chapel. There’s a note nearby indicating that for $100, you can light a candle (which will be promptly extinguished at 5 pm).   

 Interestingly, the chapel is no longer a church.   The Sisters of Loretto sold the property to a private entity for $500,000 about 50 years ago.   The chapel is now just a private museum that is not affiliated with any church, government, or foundation owned by the family of Jim Kirkpatrick.   The family is currently developing a hotel next to the chapel.  I wish that known some of this prior to visiting the chapel.   While I don’t belittle anyone from making a living and commend the family for preserving the chapel and staircase, the commercial nature of the chapel certainly detracts from how I feel about the place.  

 Meow Wolf

Meow Wolf is an arts and entertainment company formed in 2008, which operates a 20,000 square foot immersive art installation with over 70 rooms known as the House of Eternal Return.  The name is random.  At the first meeting of the artists, everyone present wrote a word on two scraps of paper that were placed in a hat.  The first two scraps drawn from the hat became the name of the collective: Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf struck me as a little too random, although that does not detract from enjoying the artistic experience.  In essence, the House of Eternal Return purports to tell the story of the fictional Selig family, who has been experimenting with interdimensional travel.   Upon paying the $35/person admission fee, we were told to look for clues throughout, starting with the mailbox outside the house.  My expectations were that the story could be discerned in the 3-4 hours we were there, but it was not.   Perhaps that is my fault for not reading any plot lines or “spoilers” prior to visiting Meow Wolf.

The story is told through notebooks, newspapers, pamphlets, business cards, letters, and audio/video logs throughout the Selig family house.  However, it’s hard to find and digest those in any meaningful manner when there are 20-30 other people around you and you don’t have 20-30 hours to spend.   Thus, unless you want to spend multiple days there, I would suggest some background on the story line prior to visiting, such as the following:

https://strawberryseahorses.com/2018/01/03/meow-wolf-the-greatest-mystery-exhibit-ever/

https://geekdad.com/2017/07/meow-wolf/

https://justafriendlygargoyle.medium.com/reaction-meow-wolfs-house-of-eternal-return-2b8a65d61500

The Selig family house does have several portals (the fireplace, the refrigerator, etc) that transported us to other dimensions during our visit.   Yet, I had great difficulty understanding how most of the other-dimensional rooms traced back to the main storyline.   The clearest tie-in was the aquarium room which mimicked the real one in the Selig family house.   Yet, when I stepped into most rooms, my reaction was: “Wow, this room is so [insert adjective like “creepy”], but what does it mean?”   In short, while the rooms were each truly amazing stand-alone artistic works, most felt arbitrary and not tied to the Selig storyline.   Thus, while I wanted to engage in the mystery of what happened, I just ended up feeling confused. 

Once I got past being confused, I settled for just enjoying the immersive experience of each room on its own unless some clue immediately leapt out at me.  I played some odd instruments, listened to lots of weird music, and delighted in the brightly colored and neon rooms that made be feel like I was back in the 1980s. The black-and-white cartoon room was probably my favorite.  I gave up figuring out what it meant to the Selig family though. 

Meow Wolf will probably appeal to most people.  About 99.9% of the visitors will probably be just like me – gaining a peripheral understanding of the Selig family’s demise and otherwise just marveling at the visual and auditory experience of each room.   The other 0.1% will go down the wormhole of trying to uncover all of the clues to discern the whole storyline, and probably never get even close.   If you are one of the 0.1% who can make sense how the rooms tie together, please let me know.     

Art is supposed to make you think – even if the net result is to say “I don’t get it.”  Indeed, I think that I’ve spent more time thinking and talking about Meow Wolf than any other piece of art I’ve encountered. Maybe that’s the whole point…   

Santa Fe Breweries

Santa Fe boasts over a dozen craft breweries, and we stopped by a few during our short stay there, including Bosque Brewing, Chile Line Brewery, Rowley Farmhouse Ales, Santa Fe Brewing, and Second Street Brewery.

Our vote for best beer goes to Bosque Brewing because they had not just one, but two PICKLE BEERS: the  (1) Pickle Down Economics Pickle Gose and (2) Pickle Up Effect Imperial Pickle Gose.   Yep, Pickle UP and Pickle DOWN. Even better, the brewery had six-packs of the Pickle Down Economics on sale for just $7.  We took home a case!

Our favorite brewery in terms of best vibe was Santa Fe Brewing.   The brewery dates back to the 1980s, but it still has an upstart sense of humor.   They still shotgun beers whenever a new one hits the line (participation is voluntary).   And I loved the story about how one of the brewery’s founders had a pet dachshund, Petey, who had gotten into some chicken coops and killed 22 chickens. To memorialize these poor chickens, Chicken Killer Barley Wine was created.

Check out the video above to learn more about Santa Fe and our time there!