Sante Fe

New Mexico History Museum

It was a short drive down to Sante Fe, a town we have visited many a time. The new attraction here is the recently opened, New Mexico History Museum, just behind the Palace of the Governors. The museum did an excellent job of tracing the history of New Mexico from the first Spanish explorers until statehood. They did continue on to the present day, but we didn’t find that as interesting. As you tour the museum, it reminds us that most of what is today’s New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California used to be part of Mexico, which was twice the size of the U.S. at the time. It was President Polk who found excuses to start a war with Mexico, so that the U.S. could realize it’s “Manifest Destiny” to stretch from ocean to ocean. New Mexico history is also filled with other battles with the Indians or between the whites – a lot of violence. The museum was definitely worth the admission.
We then took a drive up into the mountains on the east side of Sante Fe, eventually reaching the ski area. It was a pleasant drive, but I was hoping for more views of the city and West. There are large patches of Aspen as you go up, and we’re visiting at a time, where the lower slopes were just starting to leaf, and the upper slopes were still barren. It made for an interesting contrast. The aspen groves came into being after a forest fire in 1880, so eventually the fir trees will take over.
Our only problem of the day was finding the campground, our AAA book and Mary’s GPS had the directions wrong. Mary had internet connectivity, found their website, and the true directions to the campground.