A Trip to Taos

We went back to Taos, NM for our ski trip after two consecutive year skiing at Wolf Creek, CO.

We stayed at the previously favorite hotel Kachina Lodge, which used to be Best Western Kachina Lodge. The familiar excellent hot breakfast was gone; the internet was extremely slow or not working at all. We guess that the change of ownership of the hotel led to the deteriorating service.

What is not changing is the magnificent mountains at Taos Ski resort. The day before we arrived at Taos, a winter storm added 4" snow to the already good snow base at the ski resort. Nearly 95% ski trails were open when we were there, and the crowd was not as big as we had in previous visits. So it was nearly an ideal condition to ski there this time.The three thousand foot vertical drop, the long trails and steep slope made it so much more fun than it was at Wolf Creek,

Since we all can ski blue trails comfortably, we explored many more trails at the ski resort from lower front side, upper front side to backside.  As the boys went skiing on their own or with friends as usual, Lily and I skied at our own pace. We took lift #1 to white feather trail, and came down in five minutes! We took lift #1 again to transfer to lift #2, and went to the highest point the lift can reach, and went to the more beautiful, less crowded backside. We mixed green and blue trails, and attempted harder blue trails between runs.

A couple times when Lily and I got separated due to the many branches and turns of the trails, she could enjoy herself and find the way back to the main base.

My plan to hike to Kachina Peak with Lily on the last day at Taos was not realized due to the close of Kachina peak to skiers. We instead swept through all the lifts to get to many favorites trails one more time.

Lily on Lone Star Trail

Allan paused to enjoy the scenery

We tried to enjoy some good food at Taos as well this time.  Guadalajara is a very popular Mexican food restaurant - we went there for  dinner the first night. The setting is casual, the price is good, the serving is large, and the food is delicious. We went to Song's Asian restaurant which provides some authentic good Chinese food; Sushi there is good as well. The price is good, but the servings are relatively small. Because the mom-pop shop owners do not have helpers, we had to wait sometime after finishing our meals to get the check. No complaining about it though as we and friends enjoyed our after meal conversations. The third night we planed to go to Taos Pizaa Out Back. The pizzas there claimed to be excellent. We arrived at the restaurant at 7pm - the wait time to be seated was 40 minutes! We went to Pizza Hut instead.

Lily made a special arrangement for the trip home - a dinner with our graduate school friends Nancy and Joe at Blue Corn Cafe, Santa Fe. They live at Albuquerque  - so they had to drive 1 hour or so to have dinner with us. Good food, nice conversations. It felt special.