Now that the house and weather are accounted for, a few of the highlights since arriving here. On Friday night we celebrated our first week by going out for a nice dinner in town to the Anasazi Inn. It features noveau southwestern food, and was indeed quite good. Jake’s appetizer was a “cannelloni” with the shell made of thin strips of avocado wrapped around local goat cheese in a sauce of gazpacho. My main course was halibut over maitake mushrooms and fava beans and Jake’s featured lamb and – morels again! Shades of Europe.
On Saturday, we went for the really traditional Santa Fe food and entertainment. In the morning we went to the Farmer’s market and got lots of great local produce. As a supplement to breakfast we tried a foccaccia bread filled with apples and rhubarb. Next time I’m getting the breakfast burrito though filled with egg, fried potatoes and green chilies. Then we went down to the plaza later in the morning and caught the Gay Pride parade while eating a “Frito Pie”. This is a bag of fritos cut open with chili ladeled into it topped with cheese and optional jalapenos. Delicious! They sell these at the Five and Dime on the plaza and sometimes from a cart.
In the evening we went to the Santa Fe Rodeo. This was my first rodeo, and it was a blast. Events included bull riding and bareback bronco riding, calf roping, team calf roping, barrel racing and mutton busting. The rodeo starts with mutton busting. This is little kids, like 3- 6 years old I’m guessing based on size, that attempt to cling to a sheep. They all wore helmets and had huge grins after falling off, and the sheep seemed pretty patient with it all.
The bull riding was pretty frightening with the first rider falling off quickly and the bull seeming to be determined to gore him, but all was fine in the end. Very few cowboys managed to stay on the allotted 6 seconds and these were all professionals, many of whom are in the top 15 in the world apparently.
The bronco riding was different than I expected with the riders leaning back almost parallel to the horse and their legs having to stay in front of the cinch to get points. Most of them were also thrown off before 6 seconds were up.
The skill required for calf roping and barrel riding were most impressive, but the calf roping was generally unsuccessful. Guess the calves were running faster than usual that night. For the barrel riding, the women had to race around 3 barrels and back across the finish line in close to 17 seconds to win.
The rodeo offered featured lots of other entertainment. A local singer gave a decent rendition of the country western song about what she would do to her boyfriend’s pickup truck if he ever cheated on her but did not do so well leading the National Anthem. A group of women riders representing the Cheyenne Frontier Days did an amazing display of horsemanship with fancy patterns like the equivalent of a marching band on horseback at 35 mph. And a family with two boys ages maybe 8 and 16 performed. The 8 year old did trick riding including double vaults over his running pony, the 16 year old is the world’s best trick roper, both on the ground and on horseback performing really amazing roping displays, and the dad shot balloons with a 45 while running by on horseback.
On the homefront, the robin family has 3 babies keeping them very active!
No comments:
Post a Comment