O'Keeffe Country

Sunday was Georgia O'Keeffe Day for the road trip crew. We started by visiting the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe when it opened at 10:00 AM.

Before it opened, we wandered around the Plaza area one last time, taking a few daytime pictures of the adobe and the shops. The sky was clear and blue, so it isn't obvious at first glance how cold it was, but it was around 18†F, so we would take a few pictures, then run back to the car and turn on the heat to thaw out our hands.

The museum itself was nice, however. In addition to many of O'Keeffe's works, it featured an exhibit of the works of Alfred Stieglitz, O'Keeffe's husband, himself a renowned photographer. After that, we went to Museum Hill, where we saw the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

From Museum Hill, the view of Santa Fe and its surrounding mountains was breathtaking, but the wind was bracingly cold, so we didn't stick around long afterward, instead deciding to head out into O'Keeffe country before cutting back to Arizona in the late afternoon.

We took US 84 north from Santa Fe, passing by O'Keeffe's beloved Ghost Ranch and admiring the bluffs and mountains that appear in many of her paintings. It was a beautiful day (though still well below freezing), and it wasn't until we had made it far to the northwest that the roads began turning icy and snowy.

I've never driven in ice or snow before; in Austin, it is common knowledge that freezing weather shuts the entire city down for days at a time. I was rather petrified about driving through it, but it was relatively easy; nonetheless, we never stopped to get pictures of the snow that covered the landscape. To me, it was an impressive amount of snowfall, but C assured me that it was just light snow.

Along the way, a deer bounded in front of us. I was going slowly, and the buck was fairly far ahead, so there was plenty of time to stop and watch him as he pranced across the road.

The icy conditions slowed us down a great deal, and it took us far longer to get to western New Mexico than we had expected. As the sun set, we passed through Farmington, New Mexico. We decided to go twenty miles further to Shiprock to spend the night, but even though that town had a McDonald's and several gas stations, it had no motel, so we continued on to Kayenta, Arizona, about 100 miles away, the same night. We (not-so-affectionately) dubbed the town "Shitrock" as we were leaving. I'm sure the residents don't find that nearly as original or witty as we did at the time.

Thus ended our first journey through The Land of Enchantment.