Welcome to my new blog. I will mostly be blogging about my adopted hometown, Santa Fe, New Mexico, but you never know what side-trips I might take. Stay tuned.
I am a concierge with my own newly launched personal concierge and trip management service called The Santa Fe Traveler. After a life of many careers, with an emphasis on sales and marketing, I have finally found my passion. I love helping people, I love research and I love Santa Fe. Being a concierge may seem repetitive to some, but everyone is different and the challenge for me is to match travelers up with the places and activities that work for them, not boiler-plate it and send all to the same places. That would make my life boring- and that is the last thing I want to be.
Anyway, when I was a hotel concierge, the three most common personal questions guests asked were:
Where are you from? (I have a decided east coast accent.)
Do you like it here? (I love it.)
What made you come here?
The last is the question I will answer here. On a visit to Santa Fe in 1985, I was sitting atop the Puye Cliffs and I felt as if I had come home. When we returned to New York, my husband, Steve, and both agreed in a spontaneous conversation, that we would like to live in the southwest- no discussion needed. Our son was twelve at the time and we felt that it would be hard for him to adjust to a new situation on the cusp of adolescence, so we decided to wait until he was out of high school to move. When that day came, I owned a boutique in Rhinebeck, NY and loved what I was doing- it wasn’t the time to move. On a trip to Colorado in 1994, we almost bought a house. I had been in real estate and decided that it was insane to buy a house before selling ours. Turned out to be a good decision for a number of reasons. There was a housing down-turn in the Hudson Valley and it took us 18 months to sell the house, it turns out in retrospect that I would have hated living in that small, charming town, and there were no employment opportunities in the area. We put out house on the market, I arranged to close my store (it was my baby and I could not bear to sell it) and we waited and waited and waited until the house sold. Our first destination was Fort Collins, CO- my husband’s sister lived in the area. We really wanted to come to Santa Fe, but could not figure out how to make money there. Fort Collins was the three-year plan- eight years later we were still there. We decided it was time to get to Santa Fe and started making exploratory trips to the area. One dream we had was to manage a bed & breakfast. We had no experience, just a love of small inns and an inner knowing that the hospitality business was a good fit for both of us. We connected with the owners of the Hacienda Doña Andrea, in the former mining town of Cerrillos, south of Santa Fe. At first they were reluctant to hire us as we had no experience, but we are pretty convincing and they gave us a chance. Steve was the chef and I was the hospitality manager. We loved it! Nine months later, Steve had a chance to partner in a small café so we left the inn. I got a job as a concierge at a Santa Fe hotel, the Inn and Spa at Loretto and the rest in history.

Top ten reasons I live in and love Santa Fe
1. Everything but the ocean (One of the few things I really miss here- the
other is greenery- there is none)
2. The mountain views
3. The sunsets
4. An amazing amount of culture: music (opera, chamber music etc), art,
museums, galleries etc.
5. Food- Lots of great restaurants, Farmer’s Market, accesses to organics
6. The architecture- love those pueblo and Territorial houses.
7. The natural color palette- those sands and pinks, reds and purples
8. The clean air- see #9
9. The quiet- not having a major airport in town helps- ABQ is only manageable
hour away
10. The history