Rio Grande Social – Albuquerque, New Mexico
When Lisa Wong, my friend and former colleague at Intel, first cast her eyes on the Rio Grande, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. For years, she has captained dragon boat racing teams as they paddle the mighty Willamette River which is 40 feet deep and varies in width from 600 to 1,900 feet. Though some 1,700 miles shorter than the Rio Grande, the 187-mile long Willamette dwarfs the Rio Grande. There’s no way a dragon boat (forty feet long with seating for twenty paddlers) race could take place on the murky Rio Grande. Never mind that in the 1990s one of Albuquerque’s most highly regarded restaurant was called the Rio Grande Yacht Club. Our pathetically water-poor Rio Grande…