Santa Fe Shopping: To The Extreme

      Since the beginning of this trip, I have hiked more then I ever had. I used to go on weekend camping trips at Camp Piomingo with my dad and two brothers. Now since we're older, we don't do it anymore. We never walked nearly as much as we have done in Santa Fe. Apparently, my whole family was tired too so we decided to stay in town again. We slept in pretty late (for the first time). I was happy that I didn't have to have Starbuck's for the fifth morning in a row. I woke up late, watched some TV, had a snack, took a shower, and got ready to go to breakfast. I had heard some great things about the place we were going to. It was called the Tune-Up Cafe. It was a restaurant mostly for breakfast but they served other things as well. Although there were many words used to describe Tune-Up like amazing, delicious, spectacular, one word really popped out to me. The word was organic. My first experience with organic food hadn't been that great. I wasn't too excited but I was willing to try it. So I entered the restaurant, with a feeling that something I was going to try there would be delicious.

       As I entered the restaurant, I was suddenly blinded by the vibrant colors that filled the restaurant. There were pink walls, purple walls, green walls, blue walls, and orange walls. The tables were red, yellow, pink, and blue. But what caught my eye the most was the artwork. There were breathtaking pictures of canyons in Santa Fe, beautiful paintings of the small towns in New Mexico, and a gargantuan picture of a swordfish jumping over a ship. I liked how Tune-Up picked such a variety of pictures that were totally irrelevant to each other. I was already impressed of Tune-Up and I hadn't even started eating yet. When we sat down, I ordered a nice hot chocolate with extra whip cream. After that I ordered two massive chocolate chip pancakes. When we got the food, I looked at mine, seeing only three or four chocolate chips. As I sliced the pancakes open, I instantly saw thirty huge chocolate chips, ready to fill my stomach. So I dug in, every bite was even filled with more chocolate. I ate until I couldn't possibly eat anymore. After I was done, I needed something cold to quench my thirst. I asked the waitress what her favorite was and she immediately said, "watermelon juice." So I ordered watermelon juice and right as I took a sip, I gasped. This was definitely the item that I loved the best. I had found my delicious food that I would try. It tasted like the watermelon was just juiced. It turns out that although the Tune-Up Cafe was organic, they could still make a killer chocolate chip pancake. I left Tune-Up with a full stomach and ready to plop down on my couch and sleep but my parents were just about to tell me that we were going to walk around town.... for the rest of the day.

      The first shop we went to was a little store that was ensconced between an agglomeration of very big trees. It was run by a little plump lady who was of Native American descent. I really wanted to buy a Santa Fe style belt while we were there, and this looked like the perfect place to buy one. It took me about ten minutes to decide which belt I wanted. I ended up buying a gold belt with a couple green, red, and yellow shapes on it. It is a very unique belt and so far, I am the only person who I've seen wearing this belt. You may have seen me wearing this belt during school, as it is my favorite belt I own. After the belt store, we went to a couple other shops and then we stopped at this cool looking fossil store. Inside, there were so many unique things like fifty million year old rocks and huge, archaic fossils.  One thing that really caught my eye was an insanely large tooth. It had belonged to the world's biggest shark, the Megalodon. The extinction of this animal happened a long, long time ago. Another thing that was really cool were the 550 million year old trilobites. They were very small.  As I was taking pictures left and right, I noticed the cashier getting a little irritated. I saw a sign that said, PLEASE, NO CELL PHONES, THANK YOU. As I looked at this poster, I quickly took a picture of it with my cell phone and ran out. I remembered that every picture I had took was with my cell phone and I pretty much took a picture of everything in the shop. The rest of the day was kind of a drag but I made sure I had fun by either taking pictures of everything or running around and practicing my parkour.

       As I looked at the fossils and cool rocks, I noticed that a lot of these things were found in the area. The location of New Mexico was perfect for finding those types of things. Due to it's vast desert-like surrounding, New Mexico was probably home to many prehistoric animals that were killed by drought. That would make fossils. These included many dinosaurs. The rocks also showed that a decent amount of the items in the store were from New Mexico. There were loads of sandstone, which is very common in New Mexico. Of the sandstone, there were sandstone necklaces, sandstone bracelets, even painting used with sandstone. Santa Fe is in the Mountain region. Obviously, there are many mountains and cliffs. There are also huge, beautiful meadows, lakes, and volcanic rifts. The Rio Grande is an amazing body of water, flowing all the way through New Mexico. The volcanic rift that we looked at when we hiked with the llamas was really cool too. The rift started with different types of hard rock from the bottom almost to the very top. The top was layered with awesome sandstone that was bright orange and yellow. Although we didn't do much other than walking around town, it was another great day on our amazing trip in Santa Fe.

                               So long for now,

                               This is Asa Hiken signing off and,

                               Stay Classy, Louisville, Kentucky