By BD Bondy

A while ago I wrote something about a genetically modified something or other. I don’t remember what. But it had to do with how humans have been genetically modifying their food for a long time, basically, since humans have been farming.
 
These genetic modifications weren’t done in a lab, but through evolution, through breeding qualities that were desired. Cultivating the wheat that grew with bigger grain, or breeding cattle that made more desirable milk, or meat. Bigger, or more docile, or better color, or sweeter. Whatever it was, it was cultivated over the millennia to be more what humans wanted.
 
Not everything, of course, but chickens, pigs, cattle; those aren’t natural, they were bred to be what they are today. Same with corn, rice, wheat.  The discussion about scientifically messing around with genes in a lab is NOT in this article. Maybe some other time.
 
I’ve got all these feral cats showing up, passing through. They live under our porch for a time. Sometimes for a long time. They most often leave after they’ve been captured and brought in to be fixed. No doubt a traumatic experience for them, if not humiliating. I’m sorry, but it needs to be done.

​​I love the cats under our porch. They kill mice and rats. I know. I’ve seen them. We have a camera under there and I have proof. They’ve also killed birds. Also on camera. Oh yes, that’s what I wrote about before. They are the number one bird killer in the world. By far. Feral and domestic cats account for the top 2 slots of biggest bird killer world wide. Wind turbines are on the list, but not the top 10. Read about that HERE.  https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds
 
So, as you can guess by the title, I was wondering where cats came from. They definitely aren’t ‘natural’. Don’t get mad, I’m not disparaging them. I think cats are interesting. They are sometimes adorable, and sometimes horrible, but they are amazing. Astonishing reflexes. Super fast.
 
I asked Google, and this is the short answer: Domesticated cats all come from wildcats called Felis silvestris lybica that originated in the Fertile Crescent in the Near East Neolithic period and in ancient Egypt in the Classical period.
 
Interesting, but not really an explanation. The Library of Congress has quite a bit more to say on the matter HERE. 
 
Cat domestication appeared early in civilized humans, and apparently in two major periods, the latter being in Egypt. Also, it seems that a major selective breeding change happened during the medieval period pertaining to the coats of cats, apparently trying to breed them according to their coloring.
Cats are supposed to have been taken all over the world via shipping vessels, likely to help with the rodent problems on board. Cats clearly became useful and desired by humans and a symbiotic relationship has kept them going strong. I loved fostering our kitten which was made under our porch. And his father, whom we also caught, was a pleasant fellow. His elusive mother, still fertile, the cleverest of the bunch, remains under the porch.
 
Get your pet cats neutered, please, and try and keep them inside. They will live longer.

Zach Hively
Fools Gold

As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me.

With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad.

But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself.
And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations?

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete.

The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help:

“If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…”

“Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?”

Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for.

Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again.

It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia.

“I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.”

So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.”
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He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two.
I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches.

~Jessica Rath

​​Got ya – you probably thought of chile. But that’s not what I mean, the topic of this article is: grapes. The grapes used for wine-making.

Did you know that the first wine-making grapes in the U.S. were grown in New Mexico, not in California? And did you know that the initial reason for producing wine was the Catholic Church? When the Spanish colonists settled in the Americas, including what is now New Mexico, several Catholic religious orders built churches and established missions so they could convert the indigenous populations. Franciscan monks followed the colonists to the upper Rio Grande valleys and to Santa Fe which in 1610 became the capital of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, a province of New Spain. The monks had to celebrate a daily mass, and for the sacrament of the Holy Communion they needed wine – which had spent many  months on galleys coming across from Spain, then overland to Mexico City, then from there via trade routes up to the Santa Fe province.  The wine was shipped in caskets with lead tops, which was probably poisonous; or it was shipped in goatskins, and by the time it arrived it was probably vinegar. So, the monks used choke cherries for making early wine. 
 
The Spanish King had forbidden the exportation of grape vines because he was  concerned that the New World would take over wine making. But some monks ignored this edict and smuggled some vines into what is now New Mexico, started to cultivate the stock, and soon produced their own wine – with a variety of grapes that is known as the Mission Grape and is still used today.

I learned all this and much more when I visited Stan Bader, owner of Las Parras de Abiquiú,  a five-and-a-half acres organic vineyard. “Las Parras” is Spanish for grapevines, the perfect name for this gorgeous property. I wanted to learn more about grape growing and wine making, and I couldn’t have come to a better person. Stan’s obvious love for and extensive experience with this topic make him a veritable treasure trove when it comes to anything related to grapes. 

Officially, he’s retired. In  1996/97 New Mexico’s department of Agriculture  was trying to encourage the growing of grapes, to boost the  industry, and Stan thought this might be an interesting thing to do  after retirement, as it would allow him to spend a lot of time outdoors.
 
“In 1996 we put our first grapes in and it has been a learning process ever since”, Stan told me. “I put in 200 Cabernet Franc grapes, and supposedly they’re the hardier grapes for cold weather. After one year they grew fantastic, 20-foot long vines. But when we came back next spring and started to prune, we found that they were literally dead. All the way back to the root. I went to an education conference in Albuquerque, and I was asking an old-timer what was the cause, why did this happen. He said, ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to you!’ WHAT? ‘Well’, he said, ‘you tear those out and put something in that will grow’. So that’s what we did. We took everything out, and kept six plants for 10 years, but they were never able to produce except for a couple of years. The roots never died, but the top does.”
 
I wanted to know WHY these grapes didn’t do well, and what other varieties would be more successful?
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 “The grapes used for Cabernet Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and other French wines just don’t do well here”, Stan explained. “Partly because of the cold, but also because of desiccation. We have no way to block the cold spring wind that comes down the Chama River, and that wind has extremely low humidity. The vines get dried out. We learned over time that if you keep their feet wet, if you keep the root zone wet over the winter, then the bud that’s produced up on the vine can survive.” 

“You can take a razor blade and cut across a bud – that will expose the primary, secondary, third, and sometimes even the fourth bud. You’ll see that the primary bud has died, it is brown. But the secondary isn’t. It’s green. It will take the place of the primary. BUT – it’s only half as productive as the first one. And if you lose THAT one, you’re looking at the third one, and that one is there to keep the plant alive and survive that year, but  you have to wait for other years to get fruit. We’ve had situations in the 20-plus years that I’ve been growing grapes here that everything, particularly the white grapes, died. And we had to start all over again. The roots are fine, and the little vines from the ground up which are pencil-size or a little bigger, they survive. In the spring the sap is starting to come up. You’ve already done some pruning, and if you can see drops of sap at the tips where you pruned, it means it’s coming alive, the roots are sending the moisture up. But if there’s a cold snap, if it’s in the 20s for a whole night or anything  longer than five hours,  that’s their death. If it’s under five hours  you might get them through.  The old trunks are too brittle. The moisture inside is mostly water, that water crystallizes, freezes, and then it expands,  but the brittle wood can’t, and it cracks. They can be 1/4-inch wide and go all the way to the ground. That kills the trunk, kills the arms, and you’ll have to take those out. The thin ones, pencil-size or a little larger, are more limber and the freezing doesn’t split them.”

 “A lot of the popular grapes which come from the Mediterranean area, from France, or from Germany, we can’t grow. But we can grow hybrids. Almost all my grapes are hybrids, except for Riesling: that’s a grape we can grow here. There’s a sweet version of Riesling, and there’s a dry version. They both grow here in New Mexico. Riesling is a popular wine here. While we have problems growing Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot here in the northern parts, we can grow other grapes, and we learned to make really good wines utilizing these grapes.”  

I had no idea that grapes are so sensitive but,  not everything works here in the valley, Stan says. Other places like  Velarde for example, at the mouth of the canyon of the Rio Grande, are much better for growing; people there can grow all kinds of grapes whereas Las Parras can’t. They can grow Riesling, Gewürztraminer, grapes for German wines.

“I say that I can tell people more about what NOT to do, than what to do. I learned the hard way. “

“I got into this because of my interest, as a kind of hobby. I ended up doing way more than I should have, my first 200 vines were a mistake, sort of – but other varieties, the hybrids, did well. Like Léon Millot, for example;  the French used it to color lighter wines because it has a dark skin for color. They use it to color wines like Pinot Noir which  doesn’t have a good dark color, but has great fruiting flavor. The addition of Léon Millot grapes gives the wine a robust color”.

For Stan, growing grapes is  a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. He warns though that it is  very difficult to make a profit.  Crop production isn’t all that robust, the vines just can’t produce like they do in California. Also, up here in northern New Mexico the grape vines native to the mediterranean regions (they’re called “vitis vinifera”, different from vinifera hybrids) don’t grow.  Wineries pay a premium price for those grapes whereas for the hybrids they don’t. And Stan’s vineyard is too small to have mechanical pickers, so the grapes have to be picked by hand. Plus, they have to be pruned, fertilized, watered, weeded, and if there are any pests, one has to spray. Luckily, here in the north pest control is very minimal, except for  powdery mildew  which can be controlled pretty easily with a food-grade mineral oil spray.

Las Parras is a certified organic, whole farm, but  the wineries don’t pay anything extra  for organic grapes. Most wineries don’t produce organic wines because all the grapes are mixed together. 

“On my five and a half  acres I’m doing well if I can get close to 20 tons”, Stan is telling me. “Last year we only got about half of that. For one, we had terrific winds in the spring, the whole time when they were in bud-break state and started to flower. That strong wind inhibits pollination. Grapes don’t rely on honey bees, the blossoms are too small; they rely on other native bees, and they can only handle  a light wind or breeze. Plus, May AND June had periods when it was blistering hot, close to 100 degrees, that shifts the grape plant down in terms of growth. So they didn’t produce that much.”

I was curious to learn where the Las Parras grapes would end up:
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“ I sell my grapes to four different wineries. Prior to Covid, I was almost exclusively selling to Black Mesa Winery  in Velarde. Covid disrupted the wine business, people weren’t going to restaurants, and a lot of the wine is being sold to restaurants. Lots of wineries were left with wine that they couldn’t sell. Now, after Covid, Black Mesa is selling and making hard apple cider, because  some parts of the community don’t drink wine very much. They drink beer. Apple cider right now is a hot item, and it can be ordered in  bistros and similar establishments  that sell beer. So, they don’t need so many grapes, and I sell to other wineries as well: to Tony Black’s Smuggler Winery in Bosque,  to Jaramillo Vineyards in Belen, and to Sheehan Winery near Albuquerque.”

After the interview we walked across the vineyard a bit. It was a windy, blustery day so I said hello to the resident cat – “He thinks he’s a dog”, Stan said – and then I left. Maybe the next time you drink a glass of wine, if it was produced in New Mexico, you might ponder whether any of the grapes came from Las Parras. And good luck to Stan for this year’s crops! 

Besides Georgia O’Keeffe? I bet nobody comes to mind. However, the architect who built the Mosque up on the mesa near Plaza Blanca, at Dar-al-Islam, was actually very well known beyond the borders of his country, Egypt. His name was Hassan Fathy, famous for incorporating sustainable architecture and traditional concepts and materials into his designs. 

He was born in Alexandria/Egypt in 1900 and graduated in 1926 from what is now Cairo University, with a focus on architecture and engineering. He soon gained a reputation for creating sustainable and affordable buildings. His designs were concerned with the problems of the poor and tried to improve their standard of living. He became known as the Architect for the Poor and actually published a book by that name. Besides working in Egypt, he also completed major projects in Greece, Iraq, and Pakistan. In 1976 he participated in the U.N.Habitat conference in Vancouver, Canada. He held several international positions and was given a number of prestigious awards. For example, in 1980 he received the Right Livelihood Award, which honors courageous change-makers.
 
When he died in 1989 he left behind a legacy of about 160 building projects which ranged from New Gourna, a housing project near Luxor which used traditional techniques such as adobe bricks and offered shelter for 3,200 displaced families, to elegant private residences in different cities in Egypt,  to the Dar-al-Islam Mosque and Educational Center right here in Abiquiú. Construction began in 1980.

​On one of the most blusterous days of this unusually wintery March, I met with Fatima van Hattum, a soon-to-be PhD graduate and program director at New Mexico’s statewide women’s foundation,  who had actually gone to school at Dar-al-Islam and currently serves on the board. She kindly took some time off her busy schedule to show me all around the premises. We entered the compound from the back, and while I admired the beautiful lattice windows and carved wooden doors of the classroom we were in, Fatima told me a bit about the history of Dar-al-Islam.

An American couple, and other community members, many of  whom had converted to Islam, conceived the idea of founding a Muslim community, a religious and educational center where  people from all over the world could live and study and worship together. Princess Moudi, a daughter of  the late King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, provided some of the original funding. The original founders bought a 5,000-acre area  in Abiquiú because they were attracted to the cultural diversity of the land:  Native Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos all live next to each other.

It was a very ambitious project. They had meetings, studied Islam, read books, and then they started this building. It is all made with adobe, although some of it was finished later, after the school closed.
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When I admired the doors, I remembered that Fatima’s father, Benyamin  van Hattum, is a master woodworker, and I asked whether he made them?  “Yes, my father made all the doors”,  she replied. “He is a master carpenter, and when they were looking for a carpenter in the community, they asked him, and he did all the woodwork. Some doors have specific verses, often about knowledge, carved into them.”

When Hassan Fathy came to Abiquiú to build the mosque and the other parts of the complex, he  brought two master masons from Upper Egypt who showed the local builders how to construct the domes and vaults with adobe bricks. Although  adobe is also used in New Mexico, the pueblo people use different techniques, Fatima tells me.
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We’re entering a  dorm now. I admire the style of the window lattices and doors: they’re Nubian, from Upper Egypt, Fatima explains. The window style using triangles is Northern African. Adobe is an Arabic word! It means clay brick. I certainly didn’t know that.

Fatima continues: “At its peak time,  30 to 40 families lived here, when the school was running. It went up to the 6th grade. That’s where my older siblings and I went to school. I was in Kindergarden. Some families lived right here on the mesa.”

“In the early 90s they lost the funding from Saudi Arabia and the  school closed. Dar-al-Islam became more of a retreat center, and its most consistent program has been a Teachers’ Institute. Teachers from all over the country come to learn how to teach about Islam. And in the summer it’s rented out for retreats and camps to folks from all over the country.”
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“The school employed a lot of people. Dar-al-Islam also owned the Abiquiú Inn, and all the land around it. There was a mechanic, a laundromat; many different businesses employed many people. When the school closed, a lot of people moved away. At its best time, it was a very diverse and lively  community,” 

We next enter a recent addition, built in the last five years maybe. It’s a retreat space, rented out to groups and  workshops, to larger groups from different programs, all related to Islam. The governance of the organization has changed over time after the school closed, it was managed more from afar. But this is changing again: there is a new board since last year, and Fatima and other locals who grew up in Abiquiú are members. The  consensus is that it’s a space for Muslims and Non-Muslims, a space for contemplation, prayer, and reflection for community and friends.

Fatima takes me to the  library: “They put a lot of effort into the collection. There are Arabic books, English books, all about Islam. Also books about the different regions of North Africa and the Middle East. There are sections for Fine Arts, Education, Language and Literature – sections related to a broad range of subjects. Ideally, in the future, everyone in the community could use the library”.

We enter two other courtyards. “During recess, this is where we kids would play. Some of the classrooms opened onto these courtyards”.

The big building  had  classrooms for all the different grades. It leads to the new part, and then to the mosque.

“The mosque was the first building that was built, everything else was subsequently built. It is ALL adobe – the entire compound. This is an incredible feat. The architect gave lectures and workshops. People came from all over to learn”. Fatima explains the building process some more:  “It’s similar to New Mexico adobe, the way the bricks are made is similar, but the domes, squinches, and the vaults are different.” We are in an adobe dome, and Fatima tells me to stand in one corner and  put my face in that corner. She then stood  in the opposite corner and whispered something – it came across loud and clear, out of MY corner, loud enough  so that I could hear it! These interesting acoustics are also in the Mosque.

(To see lots of photographs from the construction of the adobe buildings, click here).
We take our shoes off so we can enter the Mosque. The beauty of the space combines New Mexican and Middle Eastern art. The latillas and vigas are so New Mexican, and the windows are North African.
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We enter the room where people wash before going to pray. And now we see the front door – we had come in through the back door, the school. During the summer, people pray here every week. We look at the walls: they’re incredibly thick,  four to five  feet.

Fatima had just defended her PhD dissertation, so now she has more time to dedicate herself to a project about the local history – documenting the oral history of people here,  with stories of people who have lived here. She feels that the lessons of the past are so important, that we need  to preserve and learn from its wisdom.
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Once outside, we reach the  playground. On a bright day, one can see the Pueblo de Abiquiú, the valley, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, but today everything is grey.  Dark grey, light grey, almost white – it swallowed up everything that is more than 100 yards away. But the interesting journey that Fatima took me on, into the past, into different cultures and continents, made me forget the bleak weather. I enjoyed her knowledge and commitment.

I don’t often read the Sun newspaper, but I picked up a copy while grabbing some sinful and embarrassing snacks from the dollar store the other day. I do sometimes follow the articles about local government and events (for example the ongoing NCSWA trash debacle). And, this paper has the most outlandish and plentiful police reports I have ever seen. Anyway, deep in the classified section, I saw a small ad announcing an “experimental pop up eatery near Espanola.” It only had a phone number and was pretty vague and cryptic. I love a good mystery and was intrigued, though also on guard to it being a scam. I called the number and was answered by an even more cryptic outgoing message, asking me to leave my contact so, warily, I left my number.  I was called back on the same day by a pleasant and young sounding man who asked me some questions, mostly pertaining to my interest and experience with food and unusual places that I’ve dined at. He then invited me and one guest to the Espanola Airport on Saturday at 5pm (wait, Espanola has an airport?). He gave me a code word and told me to recite it to the staff that would meet us and, presumably, other people who saw the ad and were deemed worthy of this clandestine invite.
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Hoping we had nothing to lose by showing up, we drove to the airport the next Saturday with excitement and trepidation. There was a huge white circus-like tent, the biggest I’d ever seen, out in an open field near the runway. It looked brand new and we couldn't see what was inside from the parking area, as it was completely walled to the ground with only a small opening visible from our distance. Weirdly, there were a few horses and, I think, a llama, kind of blocking the entrance.  I’m thinking, ok, a catered feast at the airport with maybe a cowboy theme?  Strange, not super exciting, but we were game. We were met by a large shuttle, asked for the code word by the driver, then taken to the tent. I counted 30 people, so I assumed at least 15 had responded to the ad.

​We were told to walk into the small doorway, single file. It was very dark inside. Once through a short, near blackout, tunnel-like hallway, we entered a larger space. There was a dim glowing blue light and it was barely light enough to see my wife’s or anyone else’s face. Once my eyes adjusted somewhat, I saw a surprisingly small oval room, probably about 40 feet long and 25 feet wide. There were 15 very nicely set and plated tables, each with only two chairs and all on the outermost edges of the room against the wall. In the middle, on large round tables, were colorful, pyramid shaped stacks of food, maybe fruit and cakes and an array of silver pans with sterno flames? Too many to name and too dim to really understand what I was looking at. But, it was all very inviting and comfortable and strange.

​We were each guided to a table with our respective partners and asked if we preferred red or white. This could only mean wine, so we opted for red. It turned out to be a 2013 Malbec from St. Helena, one of my favorite towns in the wine region of California, and a very good year! When the wine arrived we were asked to hand over our phones and told that we would be given them back at the end of the evening. Ok then…

Pleasant, taciturn and efficient waiters brought several small plates to our table filled with very eclectic and very delicious tapas. There were succulent bbq ribs, bacon wrapped dates and small spicy deep fried jalapeños filled with a rich, creamy cheese and some sort of nut, pecans, I think. We were eating up all this mystery, wondering what the catch was and how much was this going to cost when the room started to vibrate and hum, but quietly and smoothly. Then it felt like we were thrust up, crazy fast, but again very smoothly, and the room was filled with blue, sunny light. Each table had a curved window twice as large as the table and floor to ceiling in height. It was brain twisting to try to make sense of what we were seeing. It looked like the sky, the sky at 30,000 feet, like high up in a jet, but we weren’t moving, we were, uh, hovering. What is happening here!!? We all looked at each other in disbelief. The floor started to pulsate with warm, inviting light, and then gradually louder music filled the room with a rhythmic beat. The calm waiters kept bringing out food, now on bigger plates filled with sophisticated concoctions seemingly from all parts of the world. There was Baingan Bharta, one of my favorite eggplant dishes from India and a Chicken Cacciatore, rivaling any I’ve tried in central Italy. All this amazing food and the never ending flights of wine and music and now, dancing, took me to another place. A dreamlike place where we all happily embraced the intoxication with relaxed joy. Were we drugged? During a hypnotic spin on the dance floor, my wife looked at me with the same awe and wonder we shared way back when we were falling in love for the first time. It was a beautiful moment and I can still feel like it just only happened a moment ago. Then the music softened and the floor lights started to fade, and we all seemed to come back to reality and I noticed that the windows were now dark. The waiters had cleared all of the tables, our wine glasses had disappeared and that same dim, blue light was back. Abruptly, the small door opened in the “tent” and we were all gently herded towards it, handed back our phones in the now dark, open night and put back on the shuttle.

The entire evening is blurry and distant now, like maybe the whole thing was a dream. But the memories of it my wife and I share to the tee. I’ve driven back out to that exact location where the tent was. There is no sign of it ever being there and it seems impossible that it ever could be. But I’m thankful I was able to snatch these few photos before they took our phones away. It was a truly mind blowing dining experience I doubt I’ll ever top. And, we never did get a bill…
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