This morning I took my  'sometimes'  Tuesday walk - I say sometimes because bad weather and business scheduling make me cancel.  As you immediately see, I'm  easily influenced.  Anyway, I generally take this walk between 5:30 am and 6:00 am, and not only is it good exercise, but it gives me time to plan my day and just plain think about anything that is important to me at the moment.  I enjoy these walks so much that I decided I would share them with you visitors and see what you thought.  The first thing I want to tell you is my background is not writing, it's  engineering, and even that was so long ago that I don't know anything about that either.  Because of this, anything I write should be immediately edited, but as I walked,  I thought that editing would probably take the spontaneity out it.  So after some more thought, I decided to go it alone, even if it sounded a little folksy. So here goes.

As we move towards spring and the days get longer, I start my walk a little earlier.  My home is located about 15 minutes from the plaza, which is the very heart of my beloved city. This morning, instead of starting to walk from home, I had a slightly different plan.  I decided to drive to the plaza so that after my walk I could have coffee at 'The French Pastry Shop & Creperie' along with you know what.  Well you don't go to a French pastry shop and just have coffee. The reason for the car is I didn't want to lug what I planned to consume all the way back home on foot.  After all I would have already walked an hour!!!  You see, when it comes to rationalization, I can do it with the best of them. 

At 5:30 in the morning, my feeling is that the plaza belongs almost solely to me.  I'm not a window shopper, as most men are not, but at that time of the morning it was fun looking into all the well-lighted and excellently displayed windows, and they were all mine alone.  I think most of us tend to follow a basically fixed path most everyday regardless of where we live and sometimes it's kind of fun to deviate.  As I walked along, you could see the city - I still prefer to think of it as a town - coming alive.  The newspaper people were setting up at their locations. Delivery and garbage truck drivers were busy doing their jobs.  The St. Francis Cathedral, which is located one block east of the plaza, was in full splendor as it reached for the heavens and at the same time gave me the feeling of spreading an umbrella of spiritual peace over the plaza.  I'm sure that at 5:30 in the morning in any city there is a tranquil feeling, but somehow Santa Fe is kind of special.

After an hour of hard walking and gawking in the store windows, I ended up stopping at the pastry shop to have my coffee and!!!  My car was parked directly in front of the door as planned.  At that time in the morning the patrons are mostly made of regular customers.  A number of  them are quite colorful and  interesting characters to observe.  Linda, a new waitress, came immediately to take my order, which I was immediately wanting to give after my hour's walk.  After an enjoyable two cups of coffee and a you know what - OK, a cinnamon-raisin roll -  I headed home to get ready for another day.

In the future, I plan to tell you more about the various stores and events in the general proximity of the plaza.  I hope to give you an insider's point of view.  My idea is to reacquaint those of you that have been in Santa Fe before and acquaint those of you haven't been to Santa Fe.

If I'm coming off too folksy, let me know and I'm have Richard McCord edit my writing as I know should be the case, or I'll eliminate the idea altogether.

Have a good day.

Stan