An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Tuesday continued I will start by mentioning that I had reserved an intermediate car as our rental car, but what we got was a Cadillac SUV - with Texas plates, no less. Sadly, it wasn't a big Coupe de Ville with longhorns on the front hood - I would have liked that. In reality it was just the unremarkable (felt like any other entry-level luxury SUV) XT4. But still, I felt weird driving a Caddy, like my vehicle was particularly ostentatious. Unfortunately, not our rental car This was our one long travel day. The drive from Denver to Taos takes about five hours, and it was neat to see the terrain get more dry and desert-like as we made our way south. By the time we reached Taos it looked like we in a roadrunner cartoon. Our lodging in Taos was Casa Gallina, a lovely AirBnB. The owner, a former New Yorker and graduate of Cornell Hospitality School, has a number of "casitas" (little houses) on a large property. Our casita had a living room, a full kitchen and upstairs, a bedr...

So how did we wind up visiting the Southwest? Valerie will tell you that this trip was all about fulfilling a bucket list item of mine to see a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. But to my recollection the genesis of this trip was a very enjoyable time we had last year with her high school friend Michelle and her husband Gary when they were in DC. Whichever way you land on the question of how this trip got started, it was certainly also a trip to an ancestral location for me, as my great-grandparents met and married in Pueblo, Colorado at the very end of the 19th century. My great-grandparents' wedding photo - Pueblo, Colorado Only one branch of my family followed the typical American Jewish immigrant trajectory of Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side of New York; all the other branches have more unusual stories. My paternal grandmother's family upon arrival got involved in a well-intentioned if poorly thought out scheme funded by a wealthy Jewish benefactor to es...