I love food. This is a fact. In the years of travel with my family as I grew up, we would enjoy food from all over America. There is a problem that comes with travel cuisine. When you go home you can’t get the different foods you find that you love. Therefore, when we travel we have to include food as an activity. This is never more true than with a trip to the Southwest where we get our favorite Mexican food. When we travel to New Mexico and Colorado we hunt down sopapillas.

The trick to finding good sopapillas is to ask locals for the best locations. This trip we found out that restaurants are now stuffing them with taco toppings, but the best way to eat them is to fill them with honey. We found two places that served great sopapillas in the areas we were visiting. Restaurants used to serve them in baskets before meals like some do with tortilla chips. The best we could find were that some restaurants served them as dessert and you could buy more individual sopapillas. The ones we ate made our fingers sticky, cut the spicy kick from our mouths, and made our stomachs full. The biggest disappointment was that Julia didn’t fall in love with them. She tried one bite both times, but passed on the sweet dessert. Emily could manage one each time.

Robby’s family traveled to northern New Mexico when he was a child and their family discovered a favorite restaurant in Taos. We had to stop and try it out. After hearing the stories repeated over and over we were sure that it would struggle to measure up to the hype. We are pleased to say that both their Mexican food was fantastic but so were their sopapillas. The girls tried the Mexican French Toast which was Uncle Doug’s favorite thing to eat there at age three.

Emily eating her Mexican French Toast, which was cinnamon nut bread made into French Toast. Sounded pretty good.

How can one person be in four different places at the same time? You go to the only place in the United States that has four states touch in one spot. And we did!

We are not sure if the girls really got the significant of the location, but the loved running around the huge concrete pad. There were ramps, flags, vendor booths, and fun lines and words to trace. They were sad to have to move on to the next thing.

Mama had been trying to explain how Native American women hand weave rugs. We found out that a local trading post had someone weaving in the store. Emily and Mama spent 20 minutes sitting on the floor beside a nice lady who was weaving. She was very kind to explain how she picked her designs and colors, how she does the weaving, and how each rug is commissioned. Emily was very shy and wouldn’t talk, but was very curious. This will be a sweet memory.