My trip to Santa Fe, NM. Part 1

From July 14th to the 16th, my girlfriend and myself took a road trip to Santa Fe, NM. We enjoyed good food, good scenes, and good times. But not all of it was smooth and there were a lot of weird quirks about the town and the trip in general. I never intended to write about this but there was just too much weirdness witnessed in just three days for me not too share.

Mushroom cloud? Is this 1940's New Mexico?

• The drive down was largely uneventful. We got to Santa Fe in about five and a half hours. The only mishaps here was getting a wretched sunburn on my left arm, making one arm much darker than the other, and running into a large thunderstorm on a stretch of highway that resembled the surface of Mars. If we had been killed, authorities wouldn’t have found our bodies for months.

• We got into the hotel fine and I picked up one of those touristy books. While flipping through the pages I saw some ads for a few restaurants and noticed something peculiar. They all closed at 9pm. I didn’t think much of it at the time thinking it was only these few that closed early, which were a bit too high society for my “dollar beer night” tastes . And surely most bars wouldn’t advertise in this magazine considering dive bars don’t spend money on maintenance and sanitation, never mind advertising. Little did I know, this is what storytelling refers too as foreshadowing.

Best in Santa Fe as written by a 10 year old. 9pm is bed time.

• We went to the Santa Fe plaza to check out the live music festival and get dinner. After driving through narrow one way streets with almost no stop lights and having to dodge pedestrians with a death wish, we found a parking garage at 5:30pm. The garage had a sign up that said it closed at 6pm. I thought we would be okay considering a lot of cars were still inside and a garage couldn’t possibly close that early in downtown. We parked and headed up the elevator into what appeared to be an office building and went outside. After walking toward the center of the plaza, I began to become concerned about the hours of the garage thinking that maybe we parked in a garage reserved for the office. We headed back to the garage to ask the attendant when they closed. His answer? They don’t. He would be there late and even afterwards we can pay a machine to get out.
  
  So it begs the question, why the fuck does it say the garage closes at 6pm? That is negative false advertising. They are lying about what they provide in a way that hurts them. Is it mandated like the warnings on cigarettes? If so, why not go all out? “WARNING. Parking in this garage may result in brain tumors, unknown rashes, and male pregnancy.”

• In the center of the plaza is where the live music was happening. I use the term music loosely here because we sat down in the grass and listened to one and a half songs before nearly falling into a coma. City sponsored concerts always suck though and we should have remembered that going in. They always want musicians who play non-offensive songs but that typically means musicians who play songs which are as engaging as a training video for Subway. I don‘t want to listen to a lullaby about how pretty the desert is. There are rattlesnakes and scorpions in the desert. The last thing I want to do is fall asleep around them.
  
  

This is not our scene at all

• After ditching the music festival for old people who don’t like music, we ate dinner at the Blue Corn Café. Other then spending too much money there, it was nice. Afterward, we decided to hit up the town for some drinks. We searched online for some good nightlife spots in Santa Fe and came up with a few hits. The few hits being reviews of Santa Fe saying how bad the nightlife is.

• We headed to a liquor store to buy some post bar drinks for the hotel. Inside the liquor store, we asked where a good place to get drinks was. Their answer? The Blue Corn Café. Oh awesome. The place we just came from which didn’t have a great bar feel anyway. We told the liquor store dude that and he responded, “Oh. You’re looking for a nightlife spot. Hahaha. No. There isn’t really anything like that.” That’s right. The liquor store guy laughed at us.
  
  So, again, another question. Why the holy fucking hell fuck is there no nightlife options in a town with a lot of tourists? Oh, don’t get me wrong. There was a jazz club with an obscene door cover and a “sophisticated” club with “high class” (aka. meat market). But almost no good option to get a few drinks without going broke or worrying about getting a ruffie in your drink.

• The 2nd street brewery was going to be our savior. It stayed open later and was not located in the plaza so paying for parking was not an issue. We looked up directions, headed down there…and couldn’t find the place. According to our GPS, we must have passed the place 6 times before calling the bitchiest bitch bartender since those ladies from the Miller Light commercials for directions. After giving her far more details than should be needed for somebody who lives there, we are told to turn right immediately after the train tracks. So we did that, only to end up in some industrial park where I think arms dealers where hiding the rail guns from the movie Eraser.
  
  We did manage to find the bar when we turned left after the train tracks. (And yes, it was from the direction we told the bartender we were coming from). The bar itself was behind a warehouse with absolutely no lighting on their signage which also happened to be obscured by tall trees. It’s like this bar got tips on how to attract customers from the parking garage earlier.

These trees are taller now

• Once inside the bar, my girlfriend orders a beer and is quickly ID’d. I order a beer and my ID is taken to a more well lit area of the bar about 20 feet away and examined by our wash out of a server as if it was evidence in the Casey Anthony trial. Seriously, this dude was weird and possibly on Quaaludes that expired in 1996. After ordering our beers he said absolutely nothing and just appeared a few minutes later with beer like some sort of liquor fairy.
  
  The entire bar scene was absolutely pathetic. It was a sauna in there. There were about three dudes sitting at the bar, two of which were staring at the wall, the third on his laptop. The bar looked like a dumpster. I may have contracted a rare virus from my bar stool. The worst part was the bill. We decided to call it quits after just one beer for each us. The total? Nine fucking dollars! For two fucking beers! Why in the fuckity fuck-shit mara-fuck-thon of a search for a fucking late night bar is each 12oz. beer four fucking fifty?
  
  Actually, I think I know the answer to this one. Out of the eight beers they make, a mind destroying six are IPA‘s since variety is for capitalist pigs. They are also expensive beers to make. They are basically sodomizing peoples wallets with the disguise of quality while some, like myself, think IPA’s taste like a rotting badger corpse. Ed. - I don’t want to hear it beer snobs. So having the price of my Kolsch inflated by a beer I hate angers up the blood and produces F-bombs the way Starbucks produces unfinished screenplays.
  

Are we having fun yet?

• We finished the night by getting drunk in the hotel room and watching Futurama. A good ending to a strange day. The next two days aren’t nearly as difficult but I still have some bizarre observations I would like to share. Part two coming soon.

Disclaimer: This article is of a satirical nature, based on opinion and first hand experiences. IPA's still suck though.

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