PLENARY Albuquerque

CONVENE ON SITE

More Than Just Spices and Skies in Albuquerque

“A

LL YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT Albuquerque is chiles, bal- loons, and Old Town,” said New

Mexico Jeep Tours owner Roch Hart as we jounced through the bush of a private, 20,000-acre ranch outside town. “But there’s so much more to it than that,” he added, indicating the open country all around us, filled with wild horses, fossils, and Native American petroglyphs. Hart was right. Before arriving in Al- buquerque for a press trip in late August, green chile and hot-air balloons was all I’d heard about the city on Route 66. But not for long.

After being collected from the airport by Megan Mayo, communications and tour- ism manager for the Albuquerque Conven- tion & Visitors Bureau, we drove to the Church Street Café, in the historic Casa de Ruiz in Old Town, where I got my first taste of red and green chilies, atop delicious pork tamales. As we ate, Mayo told me about the city’s setup for meetings. Although Albuquerque has 16,000 hotel rooms — nearly 800 within walking dis- tance of downtown’s Albuquerque Con- vention Center, which has 167,000 square feet of exhibit space, 27 meeting rooms, and a 31,000-square-foot ballroom — the city’s ideal conference size is from 300 to 1,200 attendees. A citywide for Albuquerque typically ranges anywhere from 750 to 6,000 people. After eating, we toured several nearby

museums, including the New Mexico Mu- seum of Natural History and Science and the Albuquerque Museum of Art and Histo- ry, and ABQ BioPark, a sprawling botanical garden, aquarium, and zoo complex. The botanical garden’s large Festival Green can accommodate several thousand people for a reception, or 1,800 for a sit-down dinner. After checking into the 273-room

Sheraton Albuquerque Uptown, we went for dinner at the legendary El Pinto, es- tablished in 1962, where we were given an impromptu tequila primer and enjoyed some smoky red-chile ribs at a table on the enchanting, light-strung patio. The next morning, we stopped by the

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HOT, HOT, HOT: Albuquerque’s many offerings include historic Old Town, home of chiles-based cuisine (top right), and the Sandia Peak Tram- way (above), which climbs along 2.7 miles — and up more than 10,000 feet.

lovely, 20-room boutique inn and organic farm Los Poblanos Inn & Cultural Center, in a verdant rural area near the Rio Grande, before taking the Sandia Peak Tramway up to 10,000 feet, affording killer views of Albuquerque. Later that day, we visited the Anderson–

Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, adjacent to Balloon Fiesta Park, where each October, during the nine- day Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, roughly 500 hot-air balloons of all shapes, sizes, and colors take flight every early morning. Other stops included the two-year-old National Museum of Nuclear Science & History and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Museum, where groups can make Native American pottery and frybread and continued on page 102

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pcma convene October 2011

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