Like many explorers, I found the Kuhn Hotel by accident. Located in the Historic Railroad District of Belen, New Mexico, the Kuhn Hotel sits hidden away behind the underpass on the secret end of a dead end street.

     New Mexico's capital city, Santa Fe, is world famous for it's rich history, museum quality art, and signature "Santa Fe style". Visitors flock to the City Different to buy legit Native American jewelry, don their best "Southwest" outfit and pursue enlightenment while navigating impossibly narrow roads in the reluctant metropolis that relies on tourism but rejects the concept of city planning.
     Any visitor worth their salt will plan to see the Loretto Chapel, San Miguel Mission, The Palace Of The Governors, La Fonda Hotel, Georgia O'Keefe Museum, and all the art galleries on Canyon Road just to get warmed up.
     As for myself, I like to seek out the places where the tourists are not. Places that don't sell Kokopelli incense burners or Pendleton blankets and where nothing is adorned with a howling coyote. 

     In 1908 three men from Cedarvale, Kansas laid out a small farming community in New Mexico. Seeing no reason to come up with a new name, they stuck with what they knew and called the new settlement Cedarvale.

     The city of Belen, New Mexico is a curious place. I grew up alongside Belen in the neighboring town of Los Lunas. My family moved to Los Lunas in 1982 and at that time Belen was a significantly larger town. They had big paved roads with sidewalks and traffic lights and even some department stores. In those days, Los Lunas had a whole lot of not much.

     The abandoned Sears and Roebuck kit house in Estancia is a must see location for any ghost-town-crawling photographer in New Mexico. It had been on my bucket list for a long time.