New Mexico

Hello dear blog-readers,
Apologies for my tardiness in updating this, I will try to be more regular after this. Dad and I just finished the better part of a week in New Mexico and it was a very busy few days with a whole bunch of gigs and GORGEOUS views, so this will be a bit of a long post. I bought my own digital camera on the first day out here and got a bit trigger-happy with it so I'm going to upload the whole photo album when I can for all your viewing pleasure and I'll post the link to that on here. For now, though, you'll get a few of the best or most representative photos from the trip. [UPDATE: I have put half the New Mexico photos up on facebook now, tried to make it public but not sure it worked. If you're my friend though you should be able to see them]

We started our tour by flying into Albuquerque, spending the night in Cerrillos with my aunt and uncle and then heading straight up to northern New Mexico to meet my former classmate Hannah, who had helped us set up an afternoon show at a beautiful adobe church with an amazing Steinway piano in Taos and a house concert that night at her place in Dixon, a historic adobe home that is owned by a Columbia University professor.

Church in Taos, NM

House Concert in Dixon, NM

The next morning, before we headed back down to Cerrillos, Hannah showed us around the Rio Grande gorge, where she's doing anthropological work on the petroglyphs and such, and also took us to the bridge that spans the gorge something like 600 feet in the air... Terrifying...

Dad and me in the Gorge

View of the Gorge from the center of the bridge.... Pictures can't really do the sheer height of it justice....

Back in the Santa Fe area we did a marathon of gigs, performing at an old Wild-West style saloon in Lamy, a great BBQ place in Santa Fe itself and an old roadhouse called the Mineshaft Tavern in Madrid, all over the course of a day and a half--10 hours of playing in a little over 24 hours! We stayed in bunk beds in a little one-room shack outside my aunt and uncle's place, heated partially by a wood stove and partially by a space heater. Finally we rounded out the weekend with a much needed day of rest and a bluegrass pickin' party! 

The view just outside our little shack

Pickin in the kitchen!

There were far too many great pictures from this part of the tour for me to put even a fraction of them up here so keep an eye out and I'll post a link to a full picture album hopefully in the next couple days [NOTE: see above update]. Until then, here's to good times and great music! Next stop, Durango, Colorado!

Cheers,

--Neil