Snapshots: A Vehicle-related Adventure

For a variety of reasons, I decided the time had come to buy another family vehicle. The main reason is that, despite owning four vehicles, none of them had less than 160,000 miles on it. Given the amount of driving I do on very sparsely traveled roads, I felt I would be more comfortable with a lower-mileage car.

Our remote location makes it challenging to buy a car, of course, and in the end, I used a service called CarMax. The whole process was mostly online. It searches all over the country within the parameters you give it, and then will ship the vehicle to your nearest location.

My search was for an older but low mileage Honda Pilot. When one showed up in California, I had it shipped to our nearest CarMax location for a test drive. Our nearest location is in Santa Fe.

Now, "nearest" is relative for us. That's still a more than two-hour drive one-way. And of course, since we would most probably be coming home with two vehicles, both adults and all the children had to go.

This was an all-day event. We left at 8:30 a.m. and didn't get home until 7:30 p.m.

Two hours of that were spent at the car place, mostly doing the paperwork involved in purchasing a car. That was boring, and long, and the children were very ready to be gone by the time it was done.

We went next to a Chinese restaurant that turned out to be not at all close to the car place. We drove and drove through what seemed like every stoplight in Santa Fe to get to this place. It was a pretty good restaurant, but the real benefit to it was that it turned out to be only about half a mile from the plaza in Santa Fe.

Despite living here for six years, I--and the two youngest children--had never been to Santa Fe. I freely admit this is kind of ridiculous. I mean, this is one of the most historic and most visited cities in the entire country. People come from all over the world to see it. So when we found ourselves so close to the historic plaza, we of course had to go.

We walked from the restaurant to downtown, first stopping at the Loretto Chapel. 

Built in the Gothic style, so it looks kind of like a mini European cathedral.

You can read all about it at their website, as well as see photos of its famous Miraculous Staircase.

I took my own photo of it, which was kind of hard as it was very crowded in there.

My children were very disappointed that no one is allowed to actually climb this.

And here is a bad photo of the altar.

Next we went to the cathedral, which is just a block or so away.

It was much bigger than I was anticipating.

If you've ever read Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (and you should), this is the cathedral being built by Bishop Lamy in the book. 

Unlike the Loretto Chapel, the cathedral is still a consecrated church, and they were getting ready to celebrate Mass, so I didn't take any photos in there. It is very brightly painted. You can see photos of the interior if you do an image search.

Staying for Mass would have made for a very late return home, so we didn't. We did stop on our way back to the car at a very old, and giant, courtyard-style home that now houses shops*. You can go into the courtyard, which has very nice plantings in it.

Hard to get a photo of, though.

I still had to stop at the grocery store on the way home, so we had to leave after that. We'll have to go back, though, because we didn't have time to see much, and there is a LOT to see in Santa Fe.

Oh, you need to see the car!

It's a 2013, but it only has 35,000 miles on it and pretty much zero wear anywhere.

In contrast to the very old Pilot, which was a 2005 and has . . . a lot of wear. And will shortly be going to the scrap metal yard.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

*Most of the historic downtown seems to consist of shops, as a matter of fact. It's a bit overwhelming.