Taos, just north of Santa Fe, is a welcoming place and famous for its galleries, inns, museums and outdoor activities including a large ski area and white-water rafting on the Rio Grande.
It was time for a day trip before I got too claustrophobic, so after several days doing mundane things except for several good hour long phone calls with our daughters and one with my best and dearest friend, Jenny from Devon, we headed for Taos, pronounced a bit like ‘house’.
Having had no breakfast, and needing a coffee fix, while stopping for diesel at a Valero Gas Station, I tried a new drink from the shop. Amongst the cappuccinos and mochas was a “horchata”. It was described as tasting like a cross between rice pudding and french vanilla, an unusual white mixture but very sweet and filling - not a smidgeon of coffee.
From our current place to Taos is a journey of about 85 miles, maybe 2 hours - it took us four hours on the High Road to reach the town center because of several stops on the way to take photos of scenery which reminded us a little of the Badlands in the Dakotas but not nearly as dramatic, various odd rock formations and later on an area that looked much like the Alpine region of Switzerland.
Just past Chimayo, seeing some unusual donkeys, we pulled in to take some pictures and met Pat who asked her son to give us a tour of the equine center. So, we were able to spend some time with a delightful young man called JJ, who loved his job at La Centinela Ranch and invited us to meet the donkeys.
The ranch also encompasses a gallery for both wood and bronze carvings where JJ’s father, Marco Oviedo is an award winning sculptor with his own foundry and also breeds mammoth donkeys, once almost extinct and still quite rare. They were used for the cavalry during the civil war both for riding and for pulling wagons and were much bigger than the mules (or burros), which were used for carrying heavy loads. We stroked the nose of a gentle, grey spotted jack donkey named Julio, a crossbreed of a Peruvian and Andalusian, who was the stallion and had his own stall. Up the hill, we petted a gentle, pregnant “jenny”, sometimes called a jennet, the female. JJ said that the gestation period for a donkey was longer than that of a horse, about 12-13 months.
It was such a delight to learn firsthand about the animals and the difference between a horse, a mule and a donkey, the three we saw together in a large enclosure. Cuca and Musca were hungry and hee-hawed their impatience loudly for the bales of fresh hay, which JJ was already on his way to throw into their fodder rack in the field.
A short way down the road, he was going to feed the flock of Churro sheep and we would have accompanied him except we were less than halfway to our destination. The Churros were introduced by the Spanish and these ones are sheared twice a year by hand - the fleece coming off almost whole by using this method. They have a soft inner wool and a longer protective coat and with 4 or more horns are somewhat related to the Jacob sheep we’ve seen in Cumbria and Scotland.
JJ’s uncle, Irvin Trujillo is a master weaver and he and his wife, Lisa, hand spin the yarn to weave “world-renown” (as mentioned on his web site) blankets and other useful items using the traditional method. Their work has been collected or shown by many U.S. museums including the Smithsonian.
On our way again, we stopped at Las Trampas to photograph an old 1760 Catholic church. Any building over 200 years old is very old for the U.S.
Arriving in historic Taos we had an excellent lunch at the Bent Street Deli and Bar in a pedestrian area of the town. Kevin, our #1 son-in-law would have loved trying some of the beers with names such as “Flying Dog Fat Tire Golden Ale” from Colorado, or “Rio Grande Outlaw Lager” from NM.
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