Dana, Jason, Ben and I left Gloucester at the beginning of a snowstorm and cruised to Logan in Jim Wiggin’s SUV Hybrid, very smooth. The plane had to be de-iced before we pushed back from the gate, which delayed departure an hour making for a tight connection at Dallas. We, and our bags, made the plane, and Tom Paalman from the church picked us up in his crew cab GMC 4WD at Albuquerque for the ride up I-25 through cactus and sagebrush to Santa Fe. This is the vehicle we’ll be driving during installation.

We arrived at Ghost Ranch Retreat Center about 12 hours after we left the shop. We have two two-bedroom apartments; very spacious and well appointed, with everything we’ll need for cooking, ironing, and such. Each bedroom has a half bath with a shared shower room. There is a relatively weak password protected Wi-Fi signal, I can get to the web but not mail, maybe something is up at our ISP.

We walked down into the center of the city, past the church only three blocks away and then did some window shopping on the way to Café Pasqual on Don Gaspar for a wonderful supper: chile Relennos, chicken mole, carne asada, then fresh blackberry pie for dessert. Toward the end of the meal, the power went out all over the downtown area, and we finished eating by candlelight only, they had to process my credit card by hand with one of those old sliding imprint machines. It was pleasant and at the same time a little spooky to walk back to the retreat center through the darkened city with giant flakes of snow falling.