Santa Fe to Oklahoma City

We began our day driving up from Santa Fe to Taos, New Mexico to visit the Taos Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited place in the USA. The Taos, or Red Willow people, have lived on this land at the foot of the Sangre Cristo Mountains for over 1,000 years. The structures are made of adobe, a combination of earth, straw and water – which is sun-hardened.

Our guide was a college student who explained that the Taos people are one of the few native peoples who never lost their land and were not forced to relocate to a reservation, despite attempts by the Spanish and United States’ governments to subjugate them. The people at the Taos Pueblo receive their drinking water directly from the mountain stream that runs next to their village. People live on the Taos Pueblo – a UNESCO World Heritage site - by choice, and do so without running water or electricity. There are many more Pueblo people living close to the Taos Pueblo in modern homes with the comforts we all take for granted.

From the Taos Pueblo, we made our way out of New Mexcio, across the Texas panhandle and into Oklahoma. Despite the nine-hour ride, we were stoked to see my nephew Patrick, a first-year student at the University of Oklahoma. We met at a great restaurant called the Blackbird Gastropub and then had dessert at Hurts Donuts, a campus fave. Happy to be with family, especially when still far from home, we made the 25-minute drive back to our hotel in Oklahoma City.

Today we head to Seneth, a small town in southeast Missouri, to see our exchange student Christopher’s mother’s host family from when she was an exchange student to the USA in the mid-1980’s. Adventures await!