Slept in today, Tarragon was very happy to be in the bed between us for a bit longer this morning. While we are in Santa Fe, we will be having breakfast at the hotel every day, mainly to take advantage of our food credit with the gold level of Hilton Honors.
As we walked to the restaurant the fireplace in the lobby was a blaze, with real pinon wood. The smell was delightful. Jerry has been talking about the smell of a pinon wood fire for weeks before this trip and now I understand why.
There are three choices for breakfast, the standard buffet, eggs, bacon, etc., only difference is that the condiments are salsa and jalapeos, a breakfast burrito or a continental buffet. I had the burrito, which was really good, green chilis on the inside red chili sauce for the outside. Jerry had the continental.
At the moment we are just getting ready for our day out about the town. Tarragon is crashed on his blanket and quite content.
take a few moments to explain how we do it. First, he has been traveling with us for a few years so he is pretty use to it. Second, when we fly with him, we fly first class so that he has more room under the seat in front of us, yes Tarragon is very spoiled and has never flown economy in his life. Finally, he has a special travel only carrier so he can distinguish between the vet carrier and the travel carrier. He also has his own suit case that contains his food, litter box, scooper, litter (I suppose you could buy it upon arrival, we just find it easier to have it upon landing), his brush and of course his laser toy.
When we fly, we try very hard to get direct flights so we can avoid long layovers, the ideal time for flying is nor more than 9 hours, including layovers. When driving we try to keep the drive time to less than 6 hours and time our arrival to any destination at check in time. We did discover this summer that he gets sea sick if the water is choppy so we try to
The hardest thing about traveling with him is finding hotels that are pet friendly. Even if they say they are pet friendly you have to be careful that their definition of pet includes cats, we have had some issues with that in the past. Several Hilton and IHG (especially Kimpton) are dog and cat friendly.
Finally, we make sure we bring something, like a blanket, that he is familiar with so he is in the room.
After breakfast, we were off to the state capital building. Why would we go to the capital building? Mainly because it has an art display on the 4th floor which is free to the public. Unfortunately, it was closed, even though the website said it would be open on Christmas Eve. We will just work it into another day.
Next was a short walk to the oldest house in the United States, built in 1640 something. It was a nice walk not to cold but very gray and a slight drizzle, the forecast was for rain most of the day, so
before we left the hotel, we picked up some umbrellas from the front desk. This of course meant we were walking advertisements for Hilton all day, but at least we were dry.
After our morning walking tour was had to go to Whole Foods to get some chips for our picnic tomorrow and a few other items we needed for the room. Before that we went to a deli called Sassella and got sandwiches for our day in the mountains tomorrow. The deli was a great Italian style deli and looking forward to the picnic tomorrow.
After our errands it was lunch time and we went to Tomasitas. This is the place to go in Santa Fe, everyone I talked to that has been here or was from here said this was a must. They were right, everything was very good. The in says Our Red Chili is Hot and hot it was, but oh so good. They also make a very good Sangria of which I had two. We started by each having a cup of Tortilla soup, it was good but needed a little heat and some salt. We both then had a version
of tamale and enchiladas, only difference was mine had two tamales and a cheese enchilada while Jerrys had one with a beef enchilada.
