(Read part one) (Read part two) (Read part three)
It was dark when they finally arrived in Las Vegas, even though it wasn't even bedtime yet. The train pulled into the station next to the Castaneda Hotel, which loomed above the train in the winter moonlight.
Eugenia and her mother ate dinner in the hotel's restaurant and then headed upstairs to their room. Eugenia thought she would be too excited to sleep, but she settled into the soft bed and suddenly felt exhausted.
The next morning, she woke up to find herself alone.
She found a note on the nightstand next to the bed, tucked under the funny owl-shaped lamp. "Wait for me here," it read. "I will come fetch you when the time comes. Love, Mama."
She waited a while in the room. She waited, and waited some more. It was after 11:00 when she became too restless to wait any longer, and decided to go exploring.
She trotted down the stairs, looking around the lobby and the restaurant to find her mother. But the hotel seemed nearly empty.
So she went outside to take a good look at the Castaneda Hotel in the daylight. It was big, beautiful, and welcoming.
And that's when she saw a window open on the top floor, and a familiar face peer out.
"Come upstairs!" Mama called out, with a big smile on her face. "I have something to show you!"
She ran up the stairs as fast as she could. She was pretty sure she knew exactly what was waiting for her up there.
Like all the locations in Eugenia's story, the Castaneda Hotel is a real place, and the pictures here were all taken by me from my one-night stay there last year. Unfortunately I completely forgot to bring Eugenia with me! Regardless I was pretty excited to walk through the hotel doors, because I remember a time not very long ago when the hotel was abandoned and decrepit.
I took this picture in 2017, the year before the hotel began to undergo renovations. Before that it was a striking and somewhat tragic sight to see either from the interstate freeway or passing through the older parts of Las Vegas. In fact it was so wretched and spooky-looking that it has been featured on a couple of ghost hunting TV shows. It is said to be haunted, but I saw and heard nothing during my visit there.
The hotel was built in 1898 by Fred Harvey, as one of numerous hotels he established across New Mexico; the Harvey House in Belen, where Eugenia has lunch before leaving the Rio Grande valley, was also his creation. The railway that brought Eugenia here was the Santa Fe, which continued east to Chicago and west to Los Angeles. Nearby is the Amtrak station, built in 1899.
The Castaneda closed in the 1940's, when rail travel began to decline as cars became more commonplace. It sat abandoned until its reopening in 2019.
The hotel is an absolute marvel. I was blown away by its complete transformation from that sad-looking pile of bricks to a polished and elegant Victorian time capsule. Each of the rooms is themed. Mine was owl-themed, as you can see by the stained glass transom window and the lamp.
Again I must mention that this is in the small, historic town of Las Vegas in the state of New Mexico, not the more famous Las Vegas in Nevada, with the casinos and theme resorts! Our Las Vegas was here first, having been founded in 1835, and it never became a big city. It's about 65 miles east of the capital city of Santa Fe. The name "las vegas" is Spanish for "the meadows", and refers to the rolling prairies to the east, which contrast beautifully with the enormous Sangre de Cristo mountains directly to the west. Beyond that, there are no major mountain ranges, just mesas. The landscape continues sloping gradually downward until the Texas border, at which point it becomes totally flat. There are no more mountain ranges east of here until you get to the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas.
I have one more chapter of Eugenia's new story to share, and then she's going to help me show off exactly what she finds at the top of the stairs! We've been working on it for weeks!
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