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How to Do Santa Fe the Right Way

Features Director Alex Postman on why she's returning to the adobe city.
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Courtesy Radish & Rye

This summer, I’m heading back to Santa Fe for a do-over.

The last time I passed through New Mexico’s adobe-encircled capital city 7,000 feet up in the Sangre de Cristo foothills, I blew it hard. First, it was no place to be with kids (or at least my kids). Don’t get me wrong—they loved wandering among the buskers and eating shaved ice in the leafy plaza, but they were far more interested in playing Pokémon Go than in the city’s 14 art institutions (like the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum), 250-plus galleries (notably SITE Santa Fe, in the Railyard, an emerging contemporary-arts hub), and its Spanish colonial churches. (Though my teens did get swept up by the wildly fantastical Meow Wolf House of Eternal Return, the sci-fi tinged interactive installation opened last year by a local art collective backed by Game of Thrones auteur George RR Martin, but I want to do it again at my own pace.)

My husband and I even had to bolt in the middle of Don Giovanni—the city's open-air opera house has insane desert views, and this summer it’s staging Mason Bates’s buzzy (R)evolution of Steve Jobs—because the kids were raising hell back at the hotel. My other goof was missing the world-famous Indian Market (August 19–20), for amazing handmade finds like Navajo rugs and black Pueblo-style pottery. Next time, we’ll be able to slowly sip our 505 Manhattans at Radish & Rye, whose 75 bourbons and whiskeys are an antidote to tequila overload, and get a table (for two, not five!) at Eloisa, where John Rivera Sedlar (his grandaunt was O’Keeffe’s chef) serves a duck enfrijolada to erase the memory of nineties “Southwestern.” And I’m booking a room at the central Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, where that kiva fireplace won’t go to waste.