The Dog Days of Fall

I was driving back home tonight, turning off East Ave onto Blackstone Blvd, just over a mile-and-a-half from home. The area is generally a little dark—there's a cemetery on one side and a park on the other—and in addition, a road light seemed to be out. In the summer there are often people in the park late into the evening, resulting in a row of cars along the road's edge, but it's been a cold day and an even colder evening, so there was nobody present.

Except for a dog-like shape that crossed the road, paused, and then crossed to the other side.

Having grown up for eighteen years with a succession of three different German Shepherds, I'm pretty finely attuned to their profile. This had a similar profile but something was a bit off, like I was looking at the first cousin of an Alsatian: bushy tail, leaner, just that little bit more lupine. On a hunch I pulled over to look for an owner, saw none, then tracked the animal a bit, and we traded stares....

Coyote!

We've had a few coyote sightings in the towns near Providence, and this of course is a matter of some hand-wringing. In an ironic kind of consistency, the same people who typically engage in NIMBYism about development appear to go NIMBY over coyotes as well. There's a routine controversy over whether to kill them or be more humane, and whether killing them actually decreases or increases their numbers.

My inclination was to do absolutely nothing. The animal probably lived in the expanse of the cemetery, and didn't seem to be straying into “town”. And I would have left it there, except that the divider of Blackstone Blvd. has a wonderful running path that a few people do use in the dark. The last thing I want is to wake up tomorrow and read about an animal attack (it's always slow-news days around here, so you can just imagine what the local media would do with that).

So, with some trepidation, I called 911. They answered immediately and, to his great credit, the sergeant was relaxed about the matter. He seemed to be probing for whether I was hysterical about this. Once I assured him I was not expecting that Something Should Be Done, we agreed that the beast probably lived in the cemetery, had a pleasant exchange, he put me through to inform Animal Control (whose officer was equally relaxed), and the matter ended there.

I've had quite a year where wildlife is concerned (as I discuss at the end of my posting about my sabbatical), but right next door! Now it gets interesting.

The Year of Ignorant Living

This is a slightly modified version of an article I originally wrote for Conduit, our departmental newsletter.

Alumni might wonder about the charmed lives faculty lead on sabbatical. To be sure it is tough to return to civilian life, but not for what might seem to be obvious reasons (in fact, I've greatly missed the teaching!). Instead, this year has been terrific for me mainly because of what it's meant: a return to a state of ignorance.

For all our talk that research is an activity of constantly confronting ignorance, that's not what we really do. Research is more typically a man, a plan, canal panama (women sensibly leave absurd canals out of the picture). We may not know what precise result we're going to get—or even trying to get—but in the big picture we don't flail around very much.

I hadn't planned to spend this past year flailing. Now, I regard tenure less as a reward for past activity and more as a recognition of future promise; so the best way to honor it is to do something new, to view the freedom to take risks as an obligation to do so. Anyway, that's the theory; this runs headlong into (a) having established programs of work in place, (b) not knowing how to achieve ignorance (it's easy to decide to not publish papers or write grants, as Kathi and I did, but harder to decide what to do in its place), and (c) terror.

Proceeding with routine, I spent the summer and early fall working closely with Leo Meyerovich, Greg Cooper, Michael Greenberg, and Alex Bromfield on our new programming language, Flapjax. We finally released it formally in the middle of October to quite a bit of press coverage. In less than a year the experience of disseminating Flapjax has coughed up several surprises (press coverage for a programming language?—must be slow news days...), some negative in a curious fashion (as a result of which we've come to think of Flapjax not as a language but as a library), some surprisingly positive (such as its use at Berkeley). Those are all subjects for a different article.

We worked overtime on Flapjax last summer in part to have it out before I began my sabbatical travels. Kathi and I had been planning these trips for ages, carefully synchronizing the places we visited to be of mutual interest (since a sabbatical is also meant to be a time to recharge personally). Even before we left Providence, however, my carefully-laid plans were destroyed by a decision by the Brown administration that demonstrated a staggering lack of wisdom (needless to say, that won't be the subject of a different article). In a way, though, it was strangely liberating: if Brown didn't want me to accomplish what I'd set out to do on sabbatical, then I was free to do other things. So I did.

Our first stop was Edinburgh. Kathi was there to visit Keith Stenning, a cognitive scientist she knew from her work on diagrammatic reasoning, while I was there to visit Phil Wadler, one of the designers of Haskell and a pioneer of many programming language concepts. I was, however, also looking forward to talking to the seemingly dozens of other researchers Edinburgh has in programming languages, verification, and other parts of applied logic and in which Brown is desperately lacking. When it came to picking an office space, Phil told us that, by coincidence, he and Keith had adjacent offices and the one across the hallway from them was empty; would Kathi and I be willing to share it? It's been a long time since I've had an officemate but Kathi and I figured we could (just about) survive each others' company, and this way we could reduce our space footprint on their department.

What we didn't learn, until our first day in Edinburgh, is that our office neighbors in Edinburgh were Keith, Phil...and nobody else. Where I'd envisioned a long hallway with logicians in every direction you look, we were in rooms of a small tenment, whose door was locked to the world at large. Nobody was ever going to find us here, nor were we going to find anybody else! (Phil did arrange for me to have another, exclusive, office in the King's Buildings, but distance from home—more than any anti-royalist tendencies—made me use it only rarely. There I would have been near all those logicians, but still in a bit of an odd corner of the world.)

Geography is destiny, they say, and it couldn't be more true here. Stenning, it transpired, was no longer working actively on visual reasoning per se; instead he was understanding the logical models behind how people reason. His focus, with his collaborator van Lambalgen of Amsterdam, was on the famous Wason experiments in cognitive psychology, which are a kind of card trick that ask the subject to arrive at conclusions and measure how closely they hew to the entailment relation of classical logic; very poorly, it turns out. This has led some to conclude that logic itself is a poor way to study how people reason. (I hear the hallelujah's from Brown's cognitive scientists.) In contrast, Stenning and van Lambalgen, and others, had revisited the issue with much more detailed studies and found that there were parameterized families of logics that perfectly well explained how the subjects reasoned, and furthermore environmental characteristics—such as how the prompts were stated—predicted how people set the parameters.

Well! Kathi and I have been spending a lot of effort on the reasoning that goes into access-control security policies; but we've always known that what we're studying is tool support without reference to the underlying cognitive models. I had been nagged for a while now that properly executing this work demanded an understanding of these human factors, but I had no idea where to start. And now Stenning had accidentally shown us the world we were looking for. Understanding the consequences of this—and learning how to supress the repressed memories of my college psychology coursework experiences—has taken up a great deal of our effort since November, and will become an even stronger focus in the future. (There's one experiment I'd love to report on here, but can't yet. Yet.)

From Edinburgh we went to Oxford and Lausanne for PC meetings, thence to Paris to fly out to India. I've written at length about returning home after such a long time. After India came Australia (for a conference, followed by a personal vacation), about which, too, my notes will eventually show up here—for now, even nine months later, the memories of that continent are too vivid for words. This was the infamous left-right-left-right period of my life.

In late-January I attended a Dagstuhl event on Web programming, in which the main thing I learned is confirmation of my opinion that the Semantic Web folks are hopelessly out of touch with reality (perhaps it's a stealth marketing strategy). I was back in Deutschland ten days later at universities in Berlin (see blog), Tübingen, and Darmstadt, a well as another Dagstuhl, this one on end-user software engineering. Coming as it did after my Damascene conversion to thinking about user-interfaces this was a fantastic opportunity to revel in ignorance and soak up knowledge from the likes of Brad Myers, Mary Shaw, Margaret Burnett, Alan Blackwell, and Stephen Clarke (a UI designer at Microsoft).

In the early spring we visited the programming languages, security, and verification people at Penn, having several enlightening conversations with Insup Lee's group on obligations as a complement to access-control. We were originally due to spend all of spring at UT Austin; given all this other travel, however, we instead made just two very focused trips to UT (which too has a wonderful mix of applied logicians of numerous stripes). UT recently had the wisdom to hire Brown alum William Cook, who is surely one of the smartest and most tasteful researchers in programming languages; only Will can make even a topic like meta-modeling sound interesting. So a week spent primarily with Will and Don Batory was heavenly.

There were other trips scattered around, but the summer was a good time to consolidate and move forward. Usually I spend much of the school year planning for the summer (and hiring students for that purpose), but this year was obviously exceptional. So it was essentially pure luck that I stumbled upon two of the best students I've worked with at Brown, Jacob Baskin and Brendan Hickey, who continue in the tradition of Brown undergrads taking me in new directions (not least of all Brendan, thanks to whom I'm talking to vice-presidents and lawyers). Combined with two students elsewhere whom I'm co-advising, and my current PhD students—Arjun, who has made strong progress on a very interesting security technique, and Jay, who is feeding me doses of the Coq theorem prover when he's not busy getting married (congrats, Jay!)—it's hard not to realize that sabbatical is over and I'm back.

The end of sabbatical doesn't mean I've stopped plumbing the depths of my ignorance. In August, Spike got me excited about graphics for the first time, and I've been programming sporadically in Matlab since. Indeed, for the first time in my life I wrote a one-use, throw-away script that actually used trignometry. This has gotten me interested in research questions related to both the images and Matlab. I can only hope that if I lie down for long enough the feeling will pass.

I've also taken the plunge on a few other fronts:

• I've long been skeptical of blogs, which associate a false temporality to thoughts. Largely pushed by Brown alum and Blogger employee Pete Hopkins, I created this blog anyway. It will be obvious to readers that I don't “get” the medium, treating it as a repository for essays rather than a dumping ground for thoughts; whether that will change, I don't yet know. I felt obliged to use Blogger, but in retrospect I realize I should have used anything but: that would be the way to test whether Pete was merely trying to drive up Blogger usage or whether he actually cared about what I have to say (my bet, like yours, is not on the latter).
• I finally decided to self-publish my programming languages text, and to put it in print using Lulu, who have been impressive. (I actually publish the book in three formats: for-pay paper, for-pay PDF and free PDF. The beauty of self-publishing is that you can perform any outrageous experiment you want!)
• I dove into understanding Creative Commons licensing—something I've put off for far too long—and found that it offered just the right mix of options for my book. So now people who've been excerpting parts of it (a.k.a., “remixing”) can do so legally.
• I've started negotiations with a publisher in India that may result in a low-cost Indian print version, which is the one of the main benefits of a formal publisher I've missed.
• I finally learned to use an image-processing application, so I can stop asking my colleague Spike, and Brown grad Morgan McGuire, how to do what I think they find the equivalent of balancing parentheses (well, for me; I count parens like some sharks count cards).

It's also been a wonderful year personally: from the urban delight that is Edinburgh to the new world being created in real-time in Bangalore, from walking in awe of nature in Australia to biking in Lance's town in Texas, from seeing (from afar) the site of the Burgess Shale to lying on my back on the Scituate Reservoir dam to bask in the Perseids. I've seen, up close and (sometimes) personal, everything from rattlesnakes to kangaroos, from a platypus to both black and grizzly bears. And as my blog's name suggests, cricket hasn't been too far away, from following a good chunk of the World Cup to fulfilling every fan's dream: watching England play Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground, even if that verb is a euphemism for the abject surrender of the Three Lions we witnessed that day. Over up!

Propane Rocks

The best way to understand New Mexico is to consider the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.

Never heard of it, you say? That's the point. In New England, it would be one of the most celebrated natural sites. Nature is audacious in New Mexico, however, so it's just another little park, so minor that the last few miles of road to it aren't even paved. (Indeed, my decade-old Rough Guide to the Southwest covers Cochiti Pueblo, where it's located, but doesn't even mention the site.)

But more on that later.

Balloons

Photo Gallery

I was in New Mexico for a conference in Santa Fe, a town I've long wanted to visit. I was fortunate that my trip coincided with Albuquerque's celebrated annual Balloon Fiesta. Having now attended, I can confirm that the event lives up to its hype. The sight of literally dozens, perhaps hundreds, of large hot-air balloons—in different colors, shapes and sizes, but never mind that, just hundreds of them—is a signt not easily forgotten.

A few practicalities:

• The most important question—to which I had trouble finding much information on-line—is whether one needs to go to the balloon park at all, or whether one can see the balloons (they are, after all, in the air, right?) from just about anywhere. The cost is modest (about USD 6), but I was more concerned about the crowds. Having made the trip, I can confirm that it's well worth going to the source. The area is so large that it's not as packed as it would seem (even though the numbers are considerable) and you get to literally walk amongst the balloons and balloonists, watching their preparation and ascent up close. Also, it's not always clear which way the wind will blow; the day I went it blew strongly to the north, and the balloon park is already north of Albuquerque, so from the center of town you wouldn't have seen a thing. (That said, some people on-line recommend going up to the high ground of Coors Ave to watch the balloons against the backdrop of the Sandia Mountains. This looks like a sound idea, but then you lose the immediacy of the ascents. If you can, do both!)
• The event is more sensitive to wind conditions than you would guess from the coverage. Winds over about 10 knots lead to cancellation. So don't give yourself only one shot at watching the balloons, or you may be disappointed.
• Don't drive to the balloon park. There's an excellent park-and-ride system with spots all over town. The extra cost is negligible (about USD 4) and saves you the bother of negotiating the crowded roads and lots. Buy the park-and-ride ticket on-line, print it, get to the lot by 5am, and you'll have a grand time.
• At the park, there's a little ridge of higher ground at the northern end. Exploit this. It's a great site to set up a tripod, or just to watch the balloons as they drift away over the surrounding suburbs. It's an entirely different experience than watching them from the lower ground of the ascension area, so do both.
• There's a grand tradition, apparently, of consuming breakfast burritos. Vegetarians will, however, have to hunt for one that doesn't have various animals pre-mixed. You can find food, but you'll have to work for it.

Beyond the visual and human spectacle, there is the problem of finding the balloons at all. I arrived at the park and walked around in a bit of a daze at—this being America—the sheer volume of commerce, everything from breakfast burritos to lapel pins to new-age crystals. After ten minutes of roaming (the Fiesta organizers boast of over a third of a mile of shops), I finally went to a nice lady manning one of the stalls and asked, a bit sheepishly, where the balloons were. She gave a big laugh, tapped me affectionately on the shoulder, said “Well, bless your heart!” as only a kindly Southern woman can, and pointed me off in the direction of the airfield.

Petroglyphs

At the other end of the human temporal spectrum is the Petroglyph National Monument (they don't have very many Parks in New Mexico—what you'd expect to be a Park invariably proves to be a Monument), one of the few national parks (I'm going to abuse terminology) sidling right up against a major city. There's a standard trail (in Boca Negra canyon) designed for everyone; this is interesting enough, but crowded, and too short to be satisfying. (If you're in reasonable shape, you need barely a third of the amount of time they estimate for each of the trails.)

But the Rinconoda Canyon trail, one intersection south from the Visitor's Center, is barely more challenging but longer, and excellent. This goes into the heart of the canyon through some fairly pristine scrubland. The park claims there are over 500 visible petroglyphs on this path; I can't say as I found more than about 20% of them (but then I was also trying to make time). The second half of this walk feels a bit disappointing—instead of walking alongside the rocks, you're now in the middle of the canyon—until you contemplate the idea of actually living here, as the creators of these petroglyphs did. Better than any interpretive sign, this walk conveys that experience.

Bandelier

Photo Gallery

One of the Southwest's more celebrated Native American sites is Bandelier, the dwelling of the Pueblo Indians from around 1000 to 1500, before poor land management (of a tough land!) caused them to abandon the site. Bandelier is known for its large collection of trails and remarkable rock dwellings, notably the so-called Long House, which is essentially a medieval condominium complex carved into a large mass of rock.

Bandelier may not be the Canyon de Chelly, but it's worth the visit nevertheless. There are two main foci in the park: the visitor's center at the bottom of the canyon, and a campground at the top. There are good trails from each, and a lovely path that connects the two. From the visitor's center a short walk takes you to the Long House and other artifacts, and a mile-long supplement takes you to a remarkable cave dwelling up in a hill. The ascent (and descent!) are not for the vertiginous; though I hate descending ladders, it felt criminal to pass up on the experience so, summoning courage, I trotted up the stairs and ladders. I'm glad I did. It's easy to see that power in such a society must have rested in those with the genes and conditioning to adapt to such a dwelling...while the slow guy got eaten by the bear.

Oh right, bears. There are black bears here. Normally I ignore this sort of information entirely, but my experiences in Banff (where we saw both black and grizzly bears) have made me a little more sensitive to such warnings (and the bear-proof trash cans everywhere were surely not installed merely to decorate or to confound the average visitor). I went to Bandelier early on a Sunday morning—well before the visitor's center opened—which is a great time to go, by the way, because it meant I essentially had the park to myself. To myself and the bears, that is.

The general advice for bear territory is to make noise as you travel, so as to avoid startling a bear. This would be fine but for the exceptional bird life in the park, and walking around reciting high-school poetry is hardly likely to help on that front. So I decided to stay silent (please, save your comments), saw some wonderful birds in the extended trail that goes to the cave dwellings, and returned uneaten and intact.

Of Bears and Other Beasts

In the early afternoon I did one of the overlook trails that emerge from the campground. Here there would be no danger of bears, or at least of coming up on one suddenly, because there are few trees and little shelter. Running late, I was rushing back from the overlook when I saw a snake sunning itself on the trail in front of me. Oh, I thought, what a lovely snake! It was a dark reddish-brown that blended well with the surrounding rock, and it had beautiful little diamond patterns on its back and black-and-white bands on its tail. Wait a minute: Diamond patterns? Black-and-white? Something I'd read back in Texas about snakes started to emerge through the haze of my consciousness, and that something was an instruction to stop. In the half-second it took for that thought to pass from brain to foot, however, I'd taken another step—enough for the snake to raise said tail and emit a loud sound like stones in a tin can. Rattling.

I'm a city boy, and we city boys know more about rats than about rattlers. I have since read that, if bitten by a rattlesnake, don't run for help: the blood circulation helps the venom spread. (Another thing I read, which does not inspire confidence: a wet rattle makes no noise.) My concerns were a little more immediate, however. Should I walk around, stand my ground and wait, or turn tail and run? (I've also since read that, from a safe distance, you can harass the snake into moving: throw a little sand at it, for instance.) Fortunately, I didn't need to learn any of this by trial and (very great!) error. I had already annoyed the snake, and after a few seconds it slithered a bit off the trail...and a bit more...and more. (All this while I was rushing to grab my camera because I know you, dear reader, will demand proof.) Finally it had moved off the trail, but was it lurking behind the large rock that it had passed behind, waiting to strike? I paused a half-minute and then, most beloved reader, having built up a full head of steam I ran, executing as perfect a steeplechase as you can ever hope to see.

Tent Rocks

Photo Gallery

So, back to those tent rocks. These “rocks” are hoodoos, a geological formation caused by the erosion of softer rock that lies under a hard top. We could employ euphemisms all day, but there is only one honest description of the result at Kasha-Katuwe, and it is perfectly accurate, even down to the details: phallic. Someone, surely, has nicknamed these the, uh, Devil's Mojo.

You absolutely should not miss out on Kasha-Katuwe (I liked it so much that I went back a second time, with Daniel Jackson). The thrill begins with the approach. Ever seen one of those roads that just heads off perpendicular to a highway, seemingly to nowhere—these are common in west Texas and other badlands—and wanted to take it to its end? Well, here's your excuse. The road, furthermore, runs just along the base of the plateau that separates Santa Fe from Albuquerque, so you can observe the escarpment up close. And then you're in hard-scrabble John Wayne country.

Which is why it's startling to suddenly see a sign to a golf course. Golf? Is there any grass, or is the entire course a sand-trap? I did not investigate, but a clue lay in the fact that there is also a dam of some size that appears to hold the water of the Rio Grande (and may explain why that river is but a mere dry bed downstream in Albuquerque). The juxtaposition of dam and golf course against the terrain adds an element of surreality.

The last five miles of the drive are on gravel (okay for cars, but not for RVs). This just heightens the sense that you're really getting out there, adding to which, you don't see the formations until you're nearly there. And then, suddenly, the hillside is alive with hoodoos...and that's not even the best part.

There are two marked trails at the main visitor point. One is a walk along the base of the cliff, leading up to an unprepossessing cave. Other than the opportunity to see one or two hoodoos (or hoodoo rocks) right up close (and, heh, heh, very personal), there's not much to be said for this loop...especially not compared to the alternative.

This alternative is the cliff walk (an out-and-back, not a loop), which takes you to the top of the formation. This is somewhat intimidatingly posted as having a 630 foot rise over 1.3 miles, which by my calculation is about a 9% incline. This posting is in fact entirely misleading, because the walk is much better and worse than that: the first mile of the walk has the same inclination as the cave loop, and virtually all the climbing happens in the last third of a mile. (Not that it's particularly hard anyway: from parking lot to the top took me 27 minutes, including pauses to make way for other people on the trail.)

But oh, what a route it is. For what they don't tell you is this: the hoodoos on this route—hidden out of sight from the parking lot and the cave loop—are vastly more dramatic; and the reason for that is that the first mile is through a slot canyon. The canyon alone is worth the price of entry and the drive, a stunning pink-and-grey confection of aggregate worn with utmost drama by wind and water. It's enough to make you forget why you came entirely, and the canyon, not the (remarkable) hoodoos, is the reason I went back to the park a second time. (Well, that and the company, but I was glad to have talked Daniel into going here.)

If you go, do it when the sun isn't directly overhead: the shadows are half the drama here. Also, if you decide not to drive the additional dozen or so miles of gravel to the next overlook, do drive another 300 yards or so, until you get to a gate, and turn around. You'll see an entirely different side of the hoodoos from there.

Interestingly, Kasha-Katuwe is only a handful of miles from Bandelier, but the drive between them is about 70 miles, the long way around. I predict that within ten years the last few miles to the tent rocks will be paved, and in a little while longer it'll be connected more directly to Bandelier. Even in New Mexico, a site this beautiful cannot be wasted. At that point, of course, someone will install an expensive cafe of the “Coyote Grill” variety at Kasha-Katuwe, but there's always the danger that, this being America, someone else will decide to illuminate the hoodoos every evening in a changing spectrum of kaleidoscopic colors. Can't happen, you think? Who could subject a great geological sight to such a travesty? You have clearly never been to Niagara, my friend.

The Cities

After all this, it was hard to care much for the cities. I must confess, too, that something has changed in my perception of the world. As I said initially, I've looked forward to visiting Santa Fe for years. But now that I was there, I couldn't bring myself to care; and what had happened in the meanwhile is Australia, a continent that completely awakened me to the natural world. That, combined with the tweeness and absolute ridiculousness of Santa Fe—a large parking lot, or a bank drive-through lanes, in regulation adobe—left me underwhelmed.

In contrast, Albuquerque exceeded my expectations. The physical location is stunning, and it seems to be a town that underpromises and overdelivers. Even the Nob Hill area, with its studied precocity, has a certain appealing modesty to it, and I was impressed by how few houses had lawns (as opposed to more regionally appropriate sand and rock) yards.

New Mexico is an interesting place. Not only nature but many generations of inhabitants have also been audacious here, with breathtaking effect (visit the Trinity Site for further evidence of that). It can be too easy to think of it—hills of yellow scrub, sky of the bluest blue—as a kind of cut-rate California, but this would be unfair and wrong. It is a slightly precarious place, seemingly dependent less on pure enterprise than on a generous dollop of federal money; and its native tribes lead a very troubled existence. (Surely their casinos do as much harm as good for a list of reasons that seems endless: the disproportionate distribution of wealth, the dependence on an unreliable revenue source, the incentive for young people to become croupiers instead of acquiring real skills, the execuse for those who might otherwise care to convince themselves to do nothing, ....) On the one hand it is a land trying hard to attract other forms of revenue (free Internet access at highway tourist information centers is surely a smart, tourist-friendly idea), but on the other hand I've never heard as many Christian stations on an FM dial.

Practicalities

Vegetarians in Albuquerque will want to check out Annapurna and the Green Light Bistro, both of which now run out of the same location at the corner of Yale and Silver, just south of the main UNM campus. This is hippie fare, but the Indian food is surprisingly pleasant (and their chapati is exquisite). Expect large portions and long waits for service, during which time you can listen to the new age music and read the Hindu philosophy on the order number flag.

Santa Fe has several vegetarian options, but food in the town in general felt a shade indifferent. Various sources raved about brunch at Cloud Cliff, but I was disappointed: the food seemed be liberally dosed in spices and sauces, but they hadn't cooked into anything. Annapurna has a branch here that I didn't visit. Tree House is very good (but drive slowly or you'll miss the entrance), though the menu on-line really has no relationship at all to what you'll find when you visit. I visited the Body Cafe several times, and concluded that their prepared food is indifferent, but their raw food is outstanding. I don't think I had a single good coffee anywhere in the state.

The Sage Inn in Santa Fe is an odd place. It's clearly a dumpy old motel that was heavily renovated. The Web site promises a great deal, but ultimately it's still just a motel, though two steps up from the typical American variant. The location is indifferent, but over time you realize it's actually pretty good (at its price) for Santa Fe: you can at least walk to the Plaza, even if the walk is not hugely pleasant. There is reasonable WiFi coverage, but the redesign clearly slightly predated modern times: there wasn't a single free power point in the room (other than the low-wattage plugs for electric shavers). The front desk staff are a morose, surly, clueless, and indifferent bunch (check your reservation carefully!). But the breakfast is surprisingly good (this being Santa Fe, you get yogurt and granola). If they would tone down their Web presence, improve the rooms for business travelers, and pay double to hire good desk staff, it'd be excellent value.

The Vagabond Executive Airport Inn in Albuquerque tries hard. They have an old facility, and the renovations give it a slightly surreal feel. The rooms are old but clean and enormous. The staff are eager to help: when my Ethernet connection wouldn't work (no wireless), they rushed me new (working) parts in two minutes. They run a 24-hour airport shuttle, and gladly also picked me up from the car rental lot the night before. But they also missed my 4am wake call, which seems pretty inexcusable for any hotel.