Day Tripping in Santa Fe, Part 1

Would the Beatles Dig Santa Fe's Outback?

Why not start on a tangent? A Day Tripping Beatles tangent?

When I was in college, at the University of Freezing Cold Buffalo New York, I had to take a psychology statistics class. I absolutely hated it. Not only because it was boring, confusing, and completely inaccessible, but because I knew that I was going to drop psychology and pre-med altogether, never become a doctor or psychiatrist, and that I was soon going to wander off on the long-winding and lonely road of becoming an artist.

But the one thing I loved about the statistics class was that my best childhood friend from second grade and now my college roommate, Rick Reaper, was in it with me. We both sat next to each other in the very last row of the small raked auditorium in the spring semester of 1967, and while the Prof was spewing statistical wisdom from the front of the classroom, we would pass handwritten, unprofessorially-seen notes, back and forth between us, trying to name every song, on every American-released Beatles album up to that year, from “Meet the Beatles” through “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band”. “The Beatles Second Album”, “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Something New”, “Beatles ‘65”, “Help” “Rubber Soul”, “Revolver”, etc. Between us, we missed nary a song.

Being more than avid Beatles fans, “The Reaper” of Paul McCartney, me of John Lennon, we would go see Richard Lester’s two films, “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help”, across the street from campus, countless times, put on our “Beatles’ caps” afterward, then scamper around like lunatics through the imitation “Roman ruins” on the UB campus - just like the Fab Four in Lester’s madcap, black and white, pre-music video sequence of “Can’t Buy Me Love”. Man, we were Beatles fanatics!

“But in the end”, I was only a fan of pre-“Abbey Road” Beatles albums. I was out - by “The White Album”. The songs started to get too saccharine and precious for me. I know I bury myself here with certain Beatles devotees, but even “Imagine” and all of the solo albums after they broke up, as Tony Soprano would say, “forgeddaboudit!”

What does interest me though is: what songs were John Lennon’s favorites? From the prolific early Beatles’ discography. When I first heard John’s own answers to this question, the songs included “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, “You Can’t Do That”, and “I’m A Loser”, but later YouTube videos have him revealing all of these others: “Help”, “Strawberry Fields”, “Girl”, “A Hard Day’s Night,” Don’t Let Me Down”, “A Day in the Life”, “I Feel Fine”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, even “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, the Beatles first release in America on December 26, 1963.

However, on both lists, both earlier and later, there sits one of my all-time favorite Beatles songs, and apparently one of John’s too, the unforgettable and driving, “Day Tripper”.

Got a good reason
For taking the easy way out
Got a good reason
For taking the easy way out, now

She was a day tripper
One-way ticket, yeah
It took me so long to find out
And I found out

End of long opening Beatles tangent.

Day trips… out of Santa Fe? They are innumerable.

Bandelier National Monument, Abiquiu Ghost Ranch (adopted home and workplace of Georgia O’Keeffe), Taos Pueblo, Jemez Springs, Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, Ojo Caliente Hot Springs (and its somewhat more refined sister hot springs south of Santa Fe, Ojo Santa Fe Spa Resort), Sandia Peak Tramway, the “hippie” craftsman town of Madrid, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, Acoma Pueblo (the oldest continually inhabited city in North America), the Catholic pilgrimage town of Chimayo, Valles Caldera National Preserve, the Puye Cliffs Dwellings, Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, the Very Large Array (with the largest radio telescope in the world), the Turquoise Trail, White Mesa and Black Mesa, White Sands National Monument, and of course downtown & Old Town Albuquerque and Historic Santa Fe itself. The list goes on…..

I think the Beatles would approve. You’ll see how - by their slightly “altered” lyrics below!

The Trules, in their relatively short ten-month Santa Fe residency, have put a considerable dent into Santa Fe Day Tripping. We call it our “Sunday afternoon outing”, but the actual day depends more upon when Surya, my hard-working wife, who now works at two different restaurants, lunch and dinner shifts, has a rare double shift off from both, on the same day. And when our sixteen-year-old son, Exsel, is not in school, or working himself, at his first job, a summer internship at a video production house in Santa Fe called Little Globe. It’s me, old “Pak Trules” (silent “k”), the fortunately retired one, with the now-flexible, full-time day-tripping schedule.

Bandelier National Monument

Let’s start with our first “day trip”, to Bandelier National Monument, often listed as Number One on the recommended “Best Day Trips from Santa Fe”.

The monument, one of our National Park Service’s oldest sites (1916), is named after Swiss-born American archaeologist, Adolph Francis Bandelier, who was introduced to the site by native Pueblo, Jose Montoya, in 1880, and who upon first seeing it, exclaimed,

"It is the grandest thing I ever saw!"

Ancestral Pueblo (“Anasazi”) cliff dwellings are scattered and restored from 1150-1600 across a broad landscape of volcanic mesas and steep-walled canyons southeast of the Jemez Mountains which also provide habitat for a wide diversity of plant and animal life. The Monument contains some of the most unusual and interesting ancient ruins in the entire American Southwest, including petroglyphs and pictographs, mountains rising to 10,200 feet, many acres of unspoiled backcountry, and a colorful section of the Rio Grande Valley. The Monument is also just a few minutes’ drive from the scientific research town of Los Alamos, now in the cinematic and popular daily news this summer, as the birthplace of Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb in the late 1940s.

I've just seen a park
I can't forget the time or spark
Where I just saw it
It’s just the place for me
And I want all the world to see
I've just seen it, mm-mm-mm di'n'di

That’s Paul… McCartney, of course, singing, about Bandelier, on the Beatles album, “Rubber Soul”.

And here’s a picture of Exsel on one of the cave-dwelling ladders. John, Paul George, and Ringo are each either climbing or sitting on one of the adjacent cave ladders, just out of camera range.

However, John is stuck, singing and pleading,

Help, I need somebody
Help, not just anybody
You know, Exsel, when I was so much younger than today
I never needed anybody's help in any way
but those days are gone & I'm not so self-assured
And now I find I've changed my mind
And opened up the doors

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being 'round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me

Exsel, ever the kind and helpful young man, actually climbs down off his own Anasazi cave ladder, climbs up the adjacent one of the ghost of John Lennon, and helps the creaky, mop-topped Liverpool gent crawl down to safety. Imagine that!

John’s wistful ghost says gratefully,

Thanks, Exsel, laddie. Much appreciate it, son.

Surya and I stare in disbelief. We feel a strange, mystical presence surrounding us on these formerly, and maybe still, sacred grounds. Perhaps ghostly, magical things, still indeed, happen on this ancient Pueblo site. However, there’s not another human being in sight to witness what I say.

So - you’ll just have to believe me.

All things Hot Springs - Wet Tripping around Santa Fe. Some Good, Some Not

The Ojo Sisters

Surya and I first visited the American Southwest in 2009, long before both Exsel’s arrival to Los Angeles in 2015 and our moving to Santa Fe in 2022. It was a geographically jagged road trip from LA through Tucson, Arizona to visit another childhood friend of mine, Big Rico, then north to the red rock vistas of Sedona, then further north and out of the way to see John Ford’s and John Wayne’s scenic Monument Valley, then further west and back a little south to Santa Fe, to visit my Chicago dancer friend, Donna Sugarman, who had since changed her last name to “Chamisa” to match the name of the local “rabbit bush”.

Ojo Caliente Hot Springs

Donna recommends, in fact, she insists, that we visit the Ojo Caliente Minerals Springs Resort and Spa, not far from Abiquiu, “the ultimate resort to soak your troubles away”.

It’s “an offer we can’t refuse”.

Less than an hour away from Santa Fe, off we go. To our first New Mexico hot springs.

With a plethora of advertising, the brochure sings the spa’s multi-purpose praises:

Take a dip in the Soda Pool to ease indigestion, or hop in the Lithia Pool to indulge in the depression-relieving waters. The Iron Pool is a must for improving circulation, while the Arsenic Pool is a combination of all three water types for an all-inclusive experience. And definitely don’t miss the Mud Pool for its psychic and skin-healing powers.

So, although I have both indigestion and depression issues, I’m not one for advertising of any kind. I’m the guy who mutes Spotify ads and records the Lakers’ games so I can fast-forward through the commercials. I don’t even watch the Super Bowl high-priced specials. Nevertheless, Surya and I head straight for the all-purpose Arsenic Pool and then… how can we deny ourselves… the red-brown New Mexican Mud Pool.

It’s more like a hot mud bath. Perfect for seals, walruses, and Trules. Dirty. Clean. Delicious. Disgusting. Blubbering. Slubbering. Identity-dissolving. Everything all at once.

I am he as you are she as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I'm crying

Sitting in a mud bath
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you've been two naughty boys and girls
You let your face grow long

I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob. Goo goo g’joob!

We soak up the mud like two naughty soufflé-makers, like two blubbering walrii. Is that even a word? Walrii? It hardly mudly matters. Goo goo g’joob!! Goo goo g’joob, good John Lennon.

We bake our mudly selves in the New Mexico sun - into two very brown, hard-crusted, burnt croissants. It feels goooood. We shower, have an over-priced bite to eat, hydrate ourselves with gallons of water, and head back to Donna’s little casita, in which we’ll find ourselves again fourteen years later, with Exsel, on the eve of the closing on our new Santa Fe home.

We drive back to LA… only to find… Surya’s engagement ring… lost in the mud. Ojo Caliente has claimed the diamond ring that I had specially made for my bride-to-be in Mumbai in 2006. Crap! That’s where it is. In Ojo’s primordial ooze, being sucked back into the center of the earth.

What can we do? Nada.

Until about three weeks later after we’ve written and called the spa and… they’ve…

…found it! Somehow! In the mud? Not in the mud? They found it… and they’ve mailed it back to us… perfectly intact.

Goo goo g’job, Ojo Sister #1!

Ojo Santa Fe Spa Resort, Sister Number Two

Slightly more refined and upscale (but not really any more expensive) than her sister to the north, Ojo Santa Fe Spa Resort, is just a twenty-minute jump south from Santa Fe, and Surya and I make it a priority to visit “on a winter’s day” (remember The Mama & Papas?) shortly after we settle into our new home near the Rodeo de Santa Fe.

There’s no mud here, just pristine thermal pools heated to various temperatures, all perfectly contained in concrete and brick structures, surrounded by beautiful cottonwood trees, and at least on the day we go, we’re one of the only guests, so the gorgeous property is like the sprawling Versailles Palace grounds offered up for private viewing.

Turn off your mind
Relax and float downstream
It is not dying
It is not dying

Lay down all thoughts
Surrender to the void
It is shining
It is shining

That you may see
The meaning of within
It is being
It is being

That love is all
That love is everyone
It is knowing
It is knowing

Our man John, before he even imagined! At the Ojo Santa Fe Hot Springs?

Besides a place to lose oneself on a glorious winter’s day, Ojo Santa Fe is a world-renowned resort that not only boasts an award-winning spa, but also the onsite Blue Heron Restaurant, luxury accommodations, and a wide array of activities, including yoga classes, archery, local dance classes, and unique “puppy visits”, none of which the Trules partook of, none of which we felt deprived of.

Hot springs tip: perhaps each to his own budget and taste.

I have several more tales and traumas of visits to hot springs nearby Santa Fe to which Surya and I adventured. Some in the slippery mud and melting ice that we barely survived. Some outside a town that looks like it’s still living in the 1950s. Some were overrated. Some we had to break the law to get to. Others were as easy and sweet as apple pie.

But my Substack app tells me,

Post too long for email.

So I better stop here and save the rest for Part 2!

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make

-John, Paul, George, & Ringo

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Trules