Not Much Happening in Santa Rosa

It was a warm morning today in Santa Rosa. The downtown streets were empty to a fair degree. The streets are amazingly wide, except at intersections where the anti-mobility cabal has bribed the city into building a concrete blob into the intersection to restrict movement. A good many stores were closed at 10:30 A.M.
What especially wasn’t happening was the morning agenda for the interim Economic and Rural Development Committee. It took a while to discover this. We were a bit late for the meeting, partly due to leaving Albuquerque a little late.
We were also late because we couldn’t find the building, the Blue Hole Dive Training and Santa Rosa Conference Center. We had an address, 244 4th Street, from the city’s website, www.srnm.org. It took a few minutes to determine the facility wasn’t on 4th Street. I figured to ask the Guadalupe County Communicator newspaper, but the office was locked. Plan B was the visitor center across the street. The woman gave us directions. After one missed turn, we got to a place that had a sign saying, “Blue Hole,” which is Santa Rosa’s renowned diving nirvana. There were folks in swim suits, but no legislator license plates, the usual sign of congregated legislators.
We sought more directions and were sent back to Blue Hole, where we had just been. This time we got out of the car and checked out the somewhat rundown appearing building next to Blue Hole. It was indeed a meeting facility. One room had tables arrayed in a manner common to committee hearing. The building was empty and locked. There was no sign on the building. We had not seen a mention of “convention center” on the sign at the parking lot entrance.
We watched families leaping into Blue Hole from a bluff perhaps 15 feet above the water. We chatted with a couple from Colorado as they donned diving gear. They prefer to dive in the Caribbean, but Santa Rosa is next best and much closer.
We then cruised downtown, saw some lovely stone buildings, bought a snack and left.
On the way out of town, for the first time we read the fine print on the website page about the conference center. It said, “Construction… is currently underway with a targeted completion date of August 2009… Opening date is still tentative.”
Road Notes:
Drivers in downtown Santa Rosa stopped to let us cross the street, even before we stepped from the curb. A nice, small town touch.
Interstate 40 has a construction project that seems to consist only of signs announcing the project.
Black blotches, presumably from grass fires, mostly small, dotted the roadside.