The weekend rolled around and we felt like we’d earned it. Relying on the kindness of our truck driving Towers neighbour Sam, we headed into town. The goal was grocery shopping with an underlying agenda of nachos and margaritas at the Taos Inn. While the boys checked out the local fly fishing shop I was greeted by an automated and frighteningly cheery “Good Morning” from the thrift shop door. It was a Johnson street worthy secondhand shop with the added bonus of a ski section. I bought the luxury of a second pair of pants, my only other pair had started giving out clouds of cement dust when I walked, not ideal.

Then we were counting speed bumps on the way to a BBQ at the Castle. It really was more of a large scale tin can, but the inside was awesome, like a kind of large scale cubby house. From the roof we could see the Mesa stretched out until it hit mountains on all sides, below geese were causing a ruckus in the same pen as a world weary rooster, who just looked with a “tell me about it” shrug of his feathers.

Mojitos, a sunken fireplace and beams of light on an 80s interior. It had the same signs we had come to associate with earthship, brilliant ideas then a sudden loss of interest, things never quite finished because another idea, another building takes over. This building and those surrounding were the genesis of an ADD way of building. It was fun, unconventional and innovative, but the people staying in the Pods didn’t have running water for two days and the girls in the castle were freezing at night.