Santa Fe...which will be known to us as Meow Wolf

Santa Fe

I have fond memories of Santa Fe from the few times I’ve been there.  I remember that it is a beautiful little town steeped in history with beautiful adobe style architecture and beautiful natural landscape.  I have fond memories of delicious food, interesting museums and meandering the streets of the old town.  It is funny how our experiences are shaped by particular moments in time, who is with you, who is not, the weather, the timing, and then our memories shape that experience in its own way...

Santa Fe is still beautiful, the adobe architecture is still lovely, there are still cool museums and I am sure good food … but travelling with three kids in a camper van is a different experience than a getaway weekend pre-kids, or even the family wedding weekend where everything was taken care of and oh-so elegant...  So this time I saw a different side of Santa Fe.  And it was pretty cool in its own way.  

We raced into town to catch the last open hour of the Folk Art Museum.  This is a neat museum that has Folk Art from around the world.

It asks “what is Folk Art?” and shows how this question has no one answer, and how the answer changes over time and depending on who you ask. (hey, sort of like the experience of visiting Santa Fe with and without kids…).  There were lots of hands on exhibits and we could easily have spent more time in the museum.

The next day we had a very unique experience.  Yes, we walked around the old town, and I pointed out the oldest continuously occupied public building in America (The Governor’s Palace), we saw the Navajo selling their jewelry as they have done for decades, we peeked into windows of expensive shops…but what we really spent time doing was hanging out at Meow Wolf.  

Meow Wolf is a unique art installation/fun house/mystery story/EXPERIENCE.  It is in a converted bowling alley in the industrial part of town, and is comprised of 77 different rooms each with quirky, trippy sensory experiences. 

 There is no right way to experience Meow Wolf.  There are no instructions on how to go through the exhibit.  And it is trippy.  We each had 3-D glasses that made some of the rooms come alive, other parts were part of a storyline about a mysterious disappearance in a family home and you could, if you chose to, try to solve the mystery.  

 

Some of the favorite installations for the family were: the fridge that you opened and then walked through (to another room), the laser harp that you could play, the room with mirrors that you access through the ice chest, the mystery component in the house with the clues scattered about.  The list goes on and on… 

We spent 4 hours at Meow Wolf.  It has nothing to do with Geology, Biology, History or SW culture, but boy it was fun.  And a principle of the trip is based on what we adults learned in Bangkok – sometimes you just do the fun thing that is geared towards kids and remember that the temples, churches and museums will be there for another trip…