On Saturday, February 8, we made the 30 minute drive to Hatch, New Mexico. We found a place to park and walked around and looked in the shops. A lot of the shops have the same ceramics and metal work. There is a lot of lawn and yard art and wall hangings. Also ceramics, spices and, of course, chile peppers. Most of the chiles are dried and you can buy them by the pound and by the heat intensity. There were some good prices on the wall art and I wished we could take something back to Minnesota. However, we do not have much extra room in the truck. Maybe we will come back someday if we buy another house. We went into a little grocery store called Vazquez Farms and found some homemade salsa that turned out to be really delicious. At another shop we bought green chile powder, red chile powder, spicy mangoes and spicy peanuts. We looked in Sparky’s trading post at all of their fascinating antiques. I saw a sign I wanted, but did not buy it. We went to Sparky’s for lunch. There was a line to order food, but it moved pretty fast. Karla and I split a burger, a Sprite and chile cheese fries. We found a booth on the far side and there was a guy playing cover tunes. The burger was pretty good. The bun fell apart so that made it messy. The chili cheese fries were very good. After lunch we went across the street to Ice Box Brewing. It is a taproom and all the beer is brewed in Las Cruces. We sat at the bar and had a beer. After our beer we went back to Sparky’s trading post and I bought the sign I had looked at earlier.

We were done with Hatch so we drove to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I parked on the main street and we walked to the Geronimo Springs Museum. They have a nice collection of minerals, fossils, pottery and historic items. We spend about an hour there and went back to the main street. We stopped in Truth or Consequences Brewing for a beer. When we were done, a lot of the shops were closing up. So we didn’t do any shopping in T or C. We took a little drive and went to the Elephant Butte Dam overlook. Really impressive dam and view. Hard to believe it was built in 1910-1916.

We started the drive back and we were hungry. There were not a lot of places open but Karla found a place in Hatch called Pepe’s Cocina. We went there and got a couple burritos. They were good, but nothing special. When we finished, we went back to our Airbnb in Las Cruces.