Meow Wolf is an artist company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe is their first permanent installation, but they have locations coming soon in Las Vegas and Denver. Meow Wolf is…(hmm, where to start?)…fun, unique, awesome and eerie. Like nothing else we’ve been to, really. Our photos don’t do the experience justice. One reason is the dim lighting and unsteady hand, but it’s also because this immersive sensory experience can hardly be truly captured in a photo frame. The place is weird, but true cool.

Plan to spend hours here. How many hours depends on which way you choose to experience the exhibit. There are two basic ways. It takes 2-3 hours to find all of the rooms (assuming we found all of them, and we’re pretty sure we did), and you can stop there if you like. But beyond just finding the rooms, there is a whole story that the house has to tell through scattered and seemingly disjointed clues, and you can search out, read, watch, and absorb all of them if you choose to attempt it. For example, some people will arrive, spend hours here, then actually return and spend many additional hours here, and still never feel as though they’ve gotten to the end. That sounds like bologna, but you really could spend days here.

And you know how when you’ve got young kids you never really get to read many info plaques at museums? Well, Meow Wolf is like that. There aren’t info plaques per se, but the sensory experience is so riveting and alluring to a kid that adults don’t really have the opportunity to focus on poring over complex clues. So we experienced the exhibit in the shorter manner (about 3 hours), zooming from one room to the next, each one revealing a brilliant new irony or fascination. So when we got home I spent hours reading about the plot line because I had to know. I was hooked. It’s a captivating tale about the paradox of order and chaos and the desire of order to contain the explosive power of raw creative energy.