Hi, again. This is Jonathan's wife, Jenny. Jonathan is currently on the way home from our friend Charlie's ordination as a priest at the cathedral at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Congratulations, Rev. Charles Cortinovis!

Anyway, since Jonathan has been busy and will continue to be busy in the upcoming week, I am going to start blogging my perspective of our trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico for another friend's wedding.

As you may know, we took an Amtrak train to New Mexico. Jonathan really likes trains, and we decided that we would have a more fulfilling adventure by taking the train down in lieu of flying. The landscape on our trip to the Southwest was breathtaking. I would really like to go back sometime to more fully explore the city and the area around it. This was the furthest West that I have been in my life. As rewarding as the trip to Santa Fe was, I personally feel that this is not an easy place to travel to, especially from Western Pennsylvania.

I am attaching here the Wikipedia entry for Santa Fe, New Mexico. The transportation section of this entry explains in more detail the air and train travel options that are available for visitors. When we were planning the trip, we discovered that Santa Fe does not have an active commercial airport (regional airline service was discontinued in 2007, and then it just started up again this month, June 2009), or does it have a railroad mainline that runs directly to the city. My understanding is that the earth was too rocky to build the mainline into Santa Fe. Some of the citizens of the city contributed money to build a spur of the railroad into the city and there is an excursion railroad that goes into the city.

However, in our personal experience, our schedule did not allow us to use this option for travel. Instead, we had to disembark from the Amtrak at the rural, quaint train station in Lamy, NM and take a shuttle bus fifteen miles through the desert into the city. Our friends who also traveled from Western PA had to fly from Pittsburgh International to Chicago, and once in Chicago they flew to Albuquerque. After they landed in Albuquerque, they rented cars and drove to Santa Fe. One of our friends completely missed the expressway exist for Santa Fe and he drove right past the city. (I discuss this in incident in more detail later.)

As remote as the city appeared to some of the Western Pennsylvania guests at this wedding, the bride and the groom do not even live in Santa Fe. They are both health care professionals working on a Native American reservation 2-3 hours from the city. Since this is the only heavily populated area near their residence, they drive to the city to do their grocery shopping to go to church, and they have to get a hotel room and make a weekend out of the excursion.

I understand that the remoteness of the area is part of its appeal for many residents and visitors. However, I perceived a sense of isolation and it brought back memories of my own experiences.

I grew up on two different rural Pennsylvania towns that are not at all easy to get to. When I was very young and living in central PA, we had to drive 15 miles to go grocery shopping and attend the closest Catholic Church. After we moved to Somerset County, we only had to drive 10 miles to reach the closest McDonald's and Walmart. We still had to drive an hour to Johnstown to reach a mall or to order a new washing machine at Sears, however. When I was a kid, our idea of a big Friday night out in the big city of Johnstown was to go appliance shopping and eat out at Ponderosa. A trip to Pittsburgh was considered to be a major event. A few years ago, a developer received permission to build a TGI Friday's ten miles from my old high school, off the PA turnpike in Somerset PA. This caused an uproar at first. People were afraid that the new-fangled restaurant would siphon business way from the local watering holes. This was the same year that the county got its first Starbuck's.

I personally feel that remote places that are hard to reach from the outside world are not easy places to live when you haven't discovered who you are yet or if you are still struggling to establish yourself in a career. When I lived in the mountain town where lived from ages 7-18, I struggled to find a minimum wage summer job within a half hours drive of my parent's house, even after two years of college. I later moved to Johnstown, PA right after college for a myriad of reasons, including the fact that I was afraid to drive in traffic and there was only one traffic light between downtown Johnstown and my parents' house 30 miles away. In Johnstown in the year 2000, before the dot com bust, job market there was so over-saturated with people with college degrees that my employer was able to decide that he would only hire people with bachelor's degrees for positions that many of his long-term employees had held with just high school diplomas. My employer's executive assistant had an MBA, and when she quit, he was able to insist that only candidates with master's degrees be considered for the empty position. I had to move two hours to Pittsburgh to make a salary higher than the average national salary for a high school graduate.

Is Santa Fe the same way? During my short visit there, I saw a lot of artists' galleries. However, I couldn't help thinking that most of these were established by people who had already made their money in more populated areas. Is Santa Fe a place where a young person, unestablished in any kind of lucrative career, can find a job and live a sustainable life? Or do they struggle to join the middle class, just as many people do in Western PA? I am curious now.