TRAVEL BEST RESTS OUT WEST

I HAVE A taste for bygones that have survived in the modern world: back roads, radio, day-olds from bakeries, used pickup trucks, wire (not plastic) fly swatters, those old warrior treasures that have been through it with you like Levis worn to a comfort that passes all understanding. It was this affinity for the old-fangled that sent me to New Mexico searching for my favorite form of on-the-road habitation, bed and breakfast inns.

It’s often confusing work to pick the rose from the encircling thorns, when a day’s traveling has made you weary and peevish, and it’s time to choose quarters for the night. Consider Santa Fe. On The Plaza, the well-known La Fonda Hotel: nice expensive rooms, I’m sure, but housed in a shapeless dung-colored pile of sham adobe with queer, meaningless knobs and stumps. Outside, sullen Indians, eyes aloofly glazed over, peddle curios; inside, a swarm of tourists like yourself shops the gift stores that offer the ubiquitous local “art,” which has become the city’s Muzak, the background hum of Santa Fe.



ON THE OTHER hand, a few blocks northeast, is Santa Fe’s first bed and breakfast inn, the Preston House: six rooms in a perfectly restored 99-year-old Queen Anne style house; sherry in the garden’s back patio at sundown; homemade pastries and bread with fresh-squeezed orange juice each morning; television and telephone only in the parlor.

While nothing in life is certain-many a slip ’twixt cup and lip-bed and breakfast inns rarely disappoint. I have never encountered a disobliging or rapacious B&B host nor an unruly guest that needed chastising with horsewhip or cane. Occasionally, you’ll see a fellow boarder belching garlic in the chat-and-doze downstairs parlor, but nothing more. Moreover, the spirit of a B&B is against selfishness: shared bathrooms, communal meals, friendships kindled when guests mingle in the dining room for early morning coffee like forest creatures gathering at their watering hole.

New Mexico is the quintessential American landscape of the West, what Walt Whitman called the “vast Something.” Wideness, desolation, solitude, incredible beauty, poverty, open range-above all, distance, distance. And over everything, the desert silence: prevailing, enormous, hardly dented by sounds that occur in it. The inn with its suggestion of isolated shelter, welcome and warmth is particularly suited to this stripped-down country dominated by sky and clouds. New Mexico is the fifth largest state in size, but with only 1.3 million people (fewer than in Harris County), it’s ranked 45th in population density with only 11 persons per square mile. Also, with a history that reaches back to Mesopotamian caravanserai in the Levant 2,500 years ago, the inn is appropriate in a state where continuity is the stock in trade. Settlements of Spaniards existed in the Sangre di Cristo Mountains before Jamestown, before pilgrims left for the New World. Indian pueblos have existed in western New Mexico since 500 A.D.

Santa Fe is the nation’s oldest state capital, and sitting among the Chinese elms and feathery cottonwoods in the Plaza, you are within a few hundred yards of the oldest American government building; the oldest hotel site; the oldest mission church and the oldest road. And the oldest forest fire symbol: Firefighters found the original Smokey the Bear in the Capitan Mountains in May 1950.

Although the New Mexico Bed and Breakfast Association lists 16 B&Bs around the state, nine are in the Santa Fe-Taos area, and that is where I centered my search.



ALBUQUERQUE to Santa Fe: To quickly plunge into New Mexican beauty, do not follow the herd up the Old Camino Real, I-H 25. Instead, take the old Route 66 (I-H 40) east 10 miles and turn north on SR 14, the Turquoise Trail, which winds around the Sandia Mountains, through ghost towns, Spanish villages and onto high mesas as you approach Santa Fe. Either route is about 60 miles. Not many miles off the Interstate, low-level cottonwoods give way to aspen, pine and fir. The air turns mountain-fresh, warm in the sun with a hint of cool nights and snow to the north. I stopped at Golden, site of the first gold strike west of the Mississippi in 1826, to view one of the region’s great Yard Art displays: fences and driftwood blooming with purple, green and amber glass, a glass garden glittering in the sun. Eleven miles north, you’ll find Madrid (accent on the first syllable), a coal town put out of business when the railroad switched to diesel. The rehabilitated miners’ cabins are those with wind chimes and solar panels. Don’t miss the nice sequined cow skulls behind the Mine Shaft Tavern’s bar and the beautiful, locally made earthenware pottery at the store next to the Madrid General Store.

Virga, those curtains of rain that evaporate midway between sky and earth, hung from the clouds as I turned off the road into Cer-rillos in search of New Mexico’s cheapest bed and breakfast inn at this last stop on the Turquoise Trail. It is a dusty Mexican border movie set with streets as empty as those on an architectural print. A startlingly beautiful blue-eyed woman feeding Burrito, the large donkey, and Honey, the smaller one, at the Petting Zoo turned out to be Patricia Brown, a 14-year resident of Cerillos and co-host with her husband, Todd, and their six children of the local conglomerate: the Casa Grande Trading Post, Petting Zoo and Bed and Breakfast Inn. Ten dollars gets you a double or single room, a huge New Mexican-style breakfast, indoor shower and outdoor toilet. “Our first guest was an old man from Turkey who sat outside looking at the chicken coop, animals and brush country and said it looked just like his home,” Patricia Brown said. No telephone, newspapers or magazines except National Geographic. (For inquiries, write the Casa Grande Trading Post, Cerrillos, New Mexico 87910.)

Then, from the funkiest to the fanciest. Northeast of Cerrillos 10 miles is the almost-ghost town of Galisteo. Behind an adobe wall, I found Napa Valley Posh at the Galisteo Inn, which offers an in-house rub-down artist, weight room, 50-foot pool with corner whirlpool and hot tub, Gregorian chants on tape, a San Francisco gourmet chef, cedar sauna and nine elegant rooms. Continental breakfast is included, dinner optional. The owner, who has a similar B&B palace northeast of San Francisco in the wine country, no doubt believes “family vacation” is an oxymoron, for no kids are allowed except “babes in arms,” as the brochure puts it. (The Galisteo Inn, 505/982-1506.)



SANTA FE: Its charm has always been an air of tranquility and distinctive antiquity, with soft-flowing forms of old architecture and a pace of life so restrained you seldom heard a horn honk. Sadly, that’s changing. The artsy-craftsy era followed the cowboy era, and now the few remaining genuine artists and long-time residents have been flung aside by the porcine stampede of the new rich era. More than ever you will need the ministrations of Signe Bergman at the Preston House. I would choose Number Five upstairs with its king-size bed, fireplace and private bath. For breakfast you can expect at least bran muffins with sour cream and maple syrup, orange coffee cake, banana bread and maple raisin cake, all baked in the nearby kitchen. You will leave heavy-bellied but not heavy-hearted. (Preston House, 505/982-3465.)

For me, the Grant Corner Inn is too cute, too precious, as sweet and sugary as the nightly Godiva chocolate on the pillow. I would fear waking up in a diabetic coma. Victorian antiques galore, Navaho rugs, piles of oh-so-homey quilts, monogrammed bathrobes and “Bumpy,” the five-year-old blonde daughter of the hosts, Pat and “Wig-gy” Walter. “Bumpy” entertains breakfast guests with her version of the book Eloise. (Grant Corner Inn, 505/983-6678.)

My second choice is the more authentic El Paradero, a rambling adobe with three new rooms done in Saltillo-tiled floors, Talavera-tiled baths and hand-woven rugs. They serve another great breakfast here, ranging from traditional Huevos Rancheros to a Kenyan dish called Maridadi eggs. Very quiet. (El Paradero, 505/988-1177.)



SANTA FE to Taos: For the best bed and breakfast in New Mexico you must turn east on SR 4 from US 84 north of Santa Fe and continue until you reach the old village of Chimayo and the Hacienda Rancho de Chi-mayo and its famous restaurant across the road. Here it is impossible not to feel a horse-kick of happiness, settling in Room Seven, say, with its cherrywood furniture and private balcony opening to a view of the long drive between the apple orchards leading to the restaurant perched on a hillside under cottonwoods. All the Hacienda rooms face a flower-filled courtyard where each morning ladies bring you a hot croissant, real orange juice, coffee and fresh fruit. At the restaurant, start with the Burrell Tortilla with green chili sauce and sliced almonds, then try the Combinacion Picanti with the house specialty: Carne Adovada, pork smothered in a high-velocity red chili sauce. Down the road are the other two reasons to visit Chimayo: the Ortega family weaving shop where seven generations have made blankets, no two identical, and the El San-tuario de Chimayo, the Lourdes of America, where the faithful stand in a small hole in a back room and rub dirt thought to be holy on their arms and legs to prevent disease. (Hacienda de Chimayo, 505/351-2222.)

Continue on the high road to Taos, past Truchas, a scrubby village clinging to the outer face of the mountains like an outpost as the Sangre de Cristo fall away in rock buttresses and long-winding ridges before they reach the master valley of the Rio Grande, to Las Trampas, a penitente stronghold with a fine 17th-century church, where houses seem to grow out of the ground, each with a patch or two of color, a string of red chilies, a turquoise door and a window box of flowers. On the northern edge of Las Trampas sits a masterpiece of engineering, a long canoe of hollowed-out cottonwood logs carrying water to fields and orchards. Both of these villages might well be hamlets of Andorra or Catalonia.



TAOS: There are three-the ancient Indian and Spanish farming outpost of Los Ranchos de Taos; the northernmost pueblo, San Geronimo de Taos; and the oddly flavorful mix of the one-time mountainmenrendezvous-Spanish settlement-now art colony of Taos itself. Tourists come for the skivalley, Kit Carson’s home and the pueblo. Icame to stay at Las Palomas de Taos, thesix-acre, 22-room estate of Mabel DodgeLuhan, where the wealthy patroness of thearts entertained D.H. Lawrence, AldousHuxley, Thomas Wolfe, Willa Cather,Georgia O’Keeffe, Robinson Jeffers andother artists. Mabel’s ghost is rumored to beabout; you’ll smell cinnamon when she’snear. Dennis Hopper owned the house during the late Sixties and early Seventies,edited Easy Rider in the back room andleft it in a shambles. Now, however, it isbeautifully restored from the window-ringed, third-story bedroom to all the mainrooms with ceilings of viga and latia construction, arched pueblo-styled doorways,hand-carved doors, pueblo fireplaces and aquiet flagstone patio shaded with huge cot-tonwoods, beech and elms. Stay in Mabel’sRoom on the second floor and you can sleepin her sturdy double bed, the only originalpiece of furniture in the house. A full NewMexican breakfast is served at eight o’clocksharp. (Las Palomas de Taos, 505/758-9456.)