Santa Fe, New Mexico, is one of North America's oldest cities. The Spanish conquistadores were settling cities like Santa Fe in the late 1500s, long before the English Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in the Northeast. We Americans often tend to forget that fact, since the Pilgrims are connected to our major holiday of Thanksgiving and get blown all out of proportion historically. Santa Fe is at an average elevation of 6,350 feet, although some of the outlying residential areas can rise to elevations considerbly higher than that. These higher areas are noticeably cooler than the central Plaza.

Carrie had been to Santa Fe quite a number of times in the past, but this was my first visit. I was pleasantly surprised and most impressed. It far exceeded my "imaginings" about how it looks. It is a jewel of a city, an historical and archeological treasure of an American city if there ever was one. In the 1940s, the Santa Fe city government passed an ordinance that all future construction of any buildings (homes or businesses) in Santa Fe had to adhere to a strict indigenous abode style building code. None could be higher than 3 or 4 floors. Moreover, the landscaping use of only native flora was encouraged. As our tour guide informed us (we took a standard one-hour tour), all vegetation in Santa Fe and elsewhere in that region is first and foremost dependent upon the elevation. Only plants that can handle the high elevations survive in these mountain plains. I assumed that one could try to plant anything that one wanted and see if it would survive. I was amused to see that the purple-leaf plum tree survives so hardily in Santa Fe, as it is also a common landscape tree here in the hot, muggy lowlands of Dixie. But a Mississippi magnolia would certainly not survive in Santa Fe, nor a Colorado aspen in Mississippi.

Carrie and I spent parts of two days in Santa Fe. On Sunday, October 16, we stopped during the afternoon for about 3 hours on our way from Albuquerque to Taos; and on Tuesday, October 18, we stopped there for a couple of hours in the morning to have breakfast at the historic, elegant La Fonda Hotel, on our way from Española back to Albuquerque.