July 22 – No travel today; instead we took the chance to have Chester’s windshield replaced while we toured Santa Fe in a borrowed car. (The crack from the rock that hit us a few days before had been growing, spreading by a good eight inches toward the center.)

The grown ups had already seen the Plaza area on a previous visit, so we decided to see some of the museums instead – particularly because we had an inside connection (more on that in a moment). After a late start, we began our visit with lunch at the museum cafe. They were serving a sampler plate of new world cuisine (connected to one of the exhibits we would see later) – delicious but extremely small portions.

Our first stop was a display of paper Japanese kites at the International Folk Art Museum where Susannah and Rowan made miniature kites of their own while Nick and Ben viewed a video on aerial kite festivals. In the same building was the exhibit on new world cuisine with a focus on chocolate and Yerba mate.

The real fun began when we met Maxine, who took a break from her curating work at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture to show us some of the collections of projectile points and other artifacts up close and personal. Ben, in particular, was eager to make his own and begged us to buy rocks he could work with – perhaps when we get home!

Following the museum tour, we visited a few stops on the local chocolate tour. We highly recommend Kakawa for its recreations of historical meso-American chocolate drinks – see Nick happily savoring a spicy rose almond concoction.

We had dinner (with frozen dessert, of course!) near the Plaza with Ken and Maxine and then enjoyed the moonrise back at their house.

Day 24: 0 miles in Chester, less than 20 miles around Santa Fe.