New Mexico Pretty

I wish I had one of those features like the voice over on the TV show Glee so that I could quickly recap from the last posting to the current one. I am busy or lazy or both and find it hard to keep this up to date. It's a good sign that my life is now full of fun, activities, and yes, work, that I don't often stop to record my day, my week or even my month.

So imagine, a real quick summary goes like this...my Mom came to visit for a recheck at Duke; her vision is now 20/63 in the "blind eye." She had another Avastin injection. Follow up again in 1 month. My sister blew out her back-really, her disc ruptured, and she had surgery this week. Nurse Dad was there for a week, followed by Nurse Mom, who is there now. Handy when your parents can go from patient to medical care provider so adeptly. Work has been busy-crazy busy. I saw more than 100% of my expected patient load for July, August and September. That's a lot of charts, exams, notes, and labs to handle.
And, we took a week of vacation to New Mexico over Labor Day.

We met Holly's parents in Taos at a house her Mom had rented for the week (Pepe's Place). It was just north of town with a spectacular view of Wheeler Peak, the highest spot in NM at 13,161 ft. A beautiful mountain range stretched out behind the house with gorgeous views of pink and purple light as the sun went down each night. The light in NM really is spectacular- as wonderful as everyone says it is. I can see why Georgia O'Keefe fell in love with it. The light changes everyday, and the views of the sky and mountains are stunning. Taos is a terrific town and reminds me a lot of Asheville and Arcata. The downtown is small and walkable, with plenty of art galleries, boutique shops, and eateries. Wisely, they have relegated the chain stores to the highway on the southern edge of town. The mix of tourists, gringos, native americans, and hispanics makes for a pretty interesting culture too. We met two women who were hiking Williams Lake the same day we were, who said that they enjoy splitting their time between Ft Myers, Florida in the winter and Taos in the summer. I can see why. Summer is sunny and warm with cool nights. Winter, apparently is long but also sunny; they'll have snow by the end of this month at some of the higher elevations. Thus the abundance of Subarus everywhere.

Here's a partial list of things we did:

a trip to Santa Fe to see the Abstract exhibit at the Georgia O'Keefe museum

a hike to Williams Lake with another hour of hiking up the bushwack trail towards Wheeler peak

a hike up Gold Hill Mtn (12711 ft); it was 38 F when we started that hike

running through our Upper Colonias neighborhood each morning with the mountain vistas filling our eyeballs

Holly and her Dad went horseback riding with a real, live, honest to goodness cowboy in Arroyo Seco

I ate honest to goodness pinon caramel ice cream in Arroyo Seco (easier on the body in so many ways)

toured the downtown Plaza, where the historic center of town is now the de facto tourist crawl

ate lunch at a picnic area overlooking the Rio Grande

So that you can see what I mean about the light, I've included some photos from the trip.