Tuesday morning started with us calling the rental car place since we’d noticed the evening before that the “check engine” light was on in our people mover. The nice lady at Alamo arranged a switch for us which we promptly went to get.
We were scheduled to pick up something like a Rav4 from the Enterprise rental outlet that we had been sent to, but the Rav4 in question was pulling out as we pulled in. The nice man at Enterprise (Alamo and Enterprise are connected somehow, I don’t know how) set us up with a Mini instead.
It was a fair trade. Since many of the family at the dinner party on Sunday evening had been suffering some sort of sniffle we had already concluded that we weren’t going to be sharing car space with any large numbers of germ ridden family so the Mini was a good solution.

We piled into the Mini and headed (literally) for the hills.
Tuesday was scheduled for a family gathering at a river that feeds out from the Abiquiu dam. There was going to be splashing and fishing and sunbathing then traipsing back to Meg’s house for Mexican food. We were lukewarm about the idea of hanging about the river all day and Andrew is supposed to stay out of the sun anyway so instead of waiting for everyone to mount up to go to Abiquiu we went ahead up into the mountains to Tierra Wools (https://www.handweavers.com) which is not quite in Chama (translation: Chama = the back ass of nowhere way up in the mountains north of Santa Fe) but close. It was a lovely drive and we spent an inordinate amount of money on some lovely woolen things. Then we turned around and headed back down the mountain, stopping for the tail end of the Abiquiu dam experience. We met up with the rest of the family in enough time to eat a couple of sandwiches, pick up a couple of rusty fish hooks that some brainless git (NOT family) had left along the river bank, then pack everyone back in the car and head back down the mountain again.
Again, beautiful drive. Breathtaking scenery, and prairie dogs are damn cute in their own environment. There were also LOTS of cattle.
It was good Mexican food at Meg’s.

The next morning David came down from Albuquerque. Nephew Sam and his clan were packing up and heading back towards North Carolina on Wednesday so we got to say goodbye to them and have a nice time with David. I wanted to do some shopping that afternoon so Andrew kindly drove me down to The Plaza. We noodled around together a little bit, but Andrew wasn’t up to walking a lot so he found a nice shady spot with good WiFi and I traipsed around a bit on my own.
After the second time I’d been accosted by an underfed, overly fussy, prissy huckster outside a skin care products storefront, complimented on my hair color, and offered help with “bagging and puffiness under [my] eyes” in the space of 10 minutes I decided I’d had enough of nosing around a tourist trap on my own so I went back to where Andrew was lurking and we went to look at knives.
We had dinner at Julia’s house that evening and put together plans to go to Bandalier National Monument the next day.

We woke up the next morning with the knowledge of why we don’t have a queen bed at home firmly reinforced in our minds.
Andrew and I are not cooperative sleepers. Andrew sleeps in more than three dimensions. I sleep deeply unless something unexpected touches me at which point I jerk.
It wasn’t a restful night.

Still, we got up, showered, contacted Andrew’s GP about the insulin, and went downstairs for breakfast. To find that the complimentary breakfast bar was only open between 0600 and 0900.

Irritating, but not fatal.

We talked to the front desk about switching rooms. The manager showed us a room on the ground floor with two twin beds which, we confirmed, would do nicely. We needed to eat, though, so we arranged with the manager that we’d move our things before official check out time at noon and went to find breakfast.

It is absolutely mystifying to both of us how, why, and what happened next. It’s maybe 7 or 8 miles between our hotel and the center of downtown Santa Fe (called “The Plaza”) where Cafe Pasqual is located. If you know what you’re doing, it’s even a straight line with one right turn to get from where our hotel is to Cafe Pasqual.
It. Took. An. Hour. To. Get. There.
An hour which was punctuated with non-Euclidian geometry, investigations of numerous Santa Fe neighborhoods, and a trip outside city limits.
Granted I’m not experienced with mobile navigation systems and my capacity for rational thought declines along the same slope as my blood sugar, but for fuck’s sake, I *can* read. I read the instructions as they came up on Google Maps and we ended up traipsing around places I don’t think I could find again if I were paid a large sum of money.

We left the hotel at about 9:45 and ended up seated and ordering our food at about 10:55. And we had to be back at the hotel to move our crap into a different room by noon.
It was an insult to the food to bolt it down like starving pirhanas but by the time there was food in front of us we were both starving, it was 11:10 a.m., and we needed to figure out how to get back to our hotel in less than an hour so we could move our stuff in time to not be charged for two rooms.
So our manners left a little to be desired.

Suffice it to say that we got breakfast and we got back to our hotel in much less time than it had taken to get to the cafe. Got our rooms switched and settled in to plan the afternoon. We’d been invited to Libby’s for dinner so we thought we’d go and get Andrew’s insulin and make a stop at Target to pick up additional pillows since the hotel couldn’t provide us with extra pillows and we each sleep with LOTS of them.
Went to Target. Got pillows. Got pillowcases. Even remembered to get Andrew a pair of headphones since the ones that he’d brought with didn’t work with the media player he’d brought.
Went to Albertson’s to get insulin.

Albertson’s had the insulin. Their pharmacy was even open. Our insurance, however, wouldn’t pay for the insulin since Andrew had just had a full 90 days’ supply delivered to our house and they couldn’t see why he should need more.
There are numerous reasons why the American health care system is in desperate need of revision. One of them is that two bottles of insulin – a medication Andrew needs to STAY ALIVE – cost us $583 and that was *after* the pharmacist pulled some strings and used some coupons. 20cc of medication. Enough to last one type 2 diabetic adult human about 14 days. $600.