Recently my wife and I moved to Trinidad, Colorado from the Midwest.  Trinidad is a small town in southeastern Colorado on the Purgatoire River at the foot of the Sangre' de Christo Mountains.  The town has everything we were looking for in a place to retire.  After living here for several months, I decided to write this blog to tell about Trinidad.  I'm afraid that there will not be much order to the blog, hence the word "random" in the title.
     Shortly after moving, in a newspaper article a local politician referred to us (not specifically us, but newcomers in general) as "transplanted newbies".  The article reminded me of a story that my niece told me some time ago.  She lives (born and raised, i.e., a native) in North Carolina.  Apparently Northerners were moving into the state with different ways of doing things.  A bumper sticker began to appear on cars in North Carolina.  It read "We don't give a damn how you did things up North."

     Several Saturdays ago we attended a presentation by rangers at Trinidad Lake State Park on cooking in a horno.  The horno is a beehive-shaped adobe oven used by both the Native Americans and those of Spanish descent throughout the southwest.  I asked the presenter who originated the horno -- the Indians or the Spanish.  He said that it originated in Africa, was brought to Spain by the Moors, and then to the Americas by the Spanish.  This made me wonder if the Native Americans put bumper (or perhaps "rumper") stickers on their horses reading "We don't give a damn how you did things in Mexico".  Carrying this thought a little father, maybe the Mexican settlers had a bumper sticker when the traders came from Missouri on the Santa Fe trail and the mountain men put bumper stickers on when the ranchers and farmers settled in the area.  Perhaps, if you invented a time travel machine, you could go back in time and make a fortune selling bumper stickers to the Germanic and Celtic tribes saying, "We don't give a damn how you did things in Rome."
     But I thought that as a transplanted newbie, I could tell about the place where I have chosen to live out my life.  Trinidad seems to be a wonderful place and daily I am finding out more that I like about it.