Day 4: I love Santa Fe!

I tried to publish some pictures but there must be a better way to do it than this. Anyway, there are a few posted below (or somewhere). Speaking of pictures, our camera seemed to not want to cooperate with us so today we ended up buying a new camera (which means even cheaper meals from now on). We just didn't want to risk not being able to take photos along the way.
Santa Fe is a lovely city and we had a really nice day here today. The Old Santa Fe Inn has a nice breakfast included in the room rate and that was a nice way to start the day. We spent the first part of the morning wandering around the downtown/plaza area. Of course, part of that time was spent in the camera shop where they're probably now celebrating the sale of a camera to the 2 guys and a dog from California. When we weren't in the camera shop we were looking at some of the historic buildings in town including the beautiful Lorretta Chapel. After that we walked back the hotel and got the car, put the top down (it was a gorgeous day) and drove to Canyon Road. This is a rather narrow tree-lined road with literally hundreds of art galleries! They are housed in charming old buildings and former houses. But before browsing the galleries we had to take care of more important matters: eating lunch. We found a cute place called the Tea Room which has a nice outdoor dining area where Mr Ripley was welcome. Our lunches were very good and it was nice sitting outside. After lunch we walked along the road and visited quite a few galleries. We could usually tell from the outside if we would be interested in checking them out. With that many galleries you can imagine that the quality was very mixed. We would always ask if dogs could come in before we entered and at everyone the people said "of course" and greeted Mr Ripley as if he were a proper patron. The people in the galleries were all very friendly which is quite a contrast to many I've visited in Chelsea where they don't even acknowledge your presence. When we headed for the car I spotted what looked like a giant Mr Ripley in front of a gallery. We went over to check it out and it was a standard Labradoodle. The owner (who also owned the gallery) was sad when we said we didn't live here because she was hoping they could be permanent playmates.
We reluctanly left the Canyon Road area because Dwyne had to get on the computer to do something for a client and I wanted to go to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. The museum is not very large but houses the largest collection of O'Keefe works. But since much of the work from the museum is currently on tour, they also had another exhibit. The other exhibit was the work of Susan Rothenberg. I liked her work because much of it is based on horse imagery. The first 4 rooms of the museum had O'Keefe paintings and then the last 3 or 4 were showing the Rothenberg pieces. I got a chuckle when some Japanese tourists went dashing up to the guard saying (insert Japanese accent here)" these are not Georgia O'Keefe paintings!!"
Tonight for dinner I wanted to eat traditional New Mexican cuisine and since we'd just bought a camera I didn't want it to be too expensive. I checked around and found a place called The Shed which fit our needs perfectly. The food was great, it wasn't too costly and the place was filled with charm.
Tomorrow we're heading for Denver. I would really like to return to Santa Fe again so I could check the area out more in depth. But for now we're cranking up Ms GPS and headin' for the road.