Secret City and Unexplained Staircase

May 12, 2011

Wow, sorry our posting was delayed.  Fairly early Thursday morning we left our really nice camping spot on Highway 4 and headed for Bandelier National Monument.  The drive through the mountains took us by a large caldera that was very pretty, and we passed a large herd of elk.  Wound around the mountain, and went down further into Bandelier.  The attendant at the park entrance told us where to park because we are slightly oversize with the rolling cave houses on, so we complied.  As soon as we were parked, a ranger came out of the VC and asked us to move to another area. Okay, we complied again. 

After stamping our passport books and watching the movie, we headed up the trail.  Bandelier has a very large circular unit that we enjoyed seeing. Without looking up the brochure, I’m thinking it had 90 some rooms. Here again there were park service employees working on the ruins. They were actually rebuilding some of the walls, and had photographs they were going by. There are also houses built up against the hill, and caves that were probably living spaces.  Barney took the trail up there and climbed some ladders to look inside. If you are into hiking, there are quite a few ruins along the canyon.

Fantastic architecture on the side of a hill

Barney at the "hillside homes"

We had our breakfast in the picnic area that was really nice, almost like a camping area with pull through spots and the picnic tables along a stream.  Fine dining at its best.

A beautiful spot for a picnic

Since we were so close, we decided to go to the museum at Los Alamos (the secret city). First we drove right up to an entrance into the national labs where we had to turn around or be searched, then we had to take a route through the hospital parking lot, up and down and around tight corners to get there because of some road work, but it was worth the effort. Some of the exhibits are hands on and the whole place was very interesting.

Next stop was Santa Fe. We found our way into old town with its very narrow streets, and lots of tourists, and discovered the public parking is not for rigs almost 12 feet high.  We did find a couple of spots near the visitor center, so got to see the Loretto Chapel and the miraculous staircase after all. We would have been disappointed to be so close and not see it. While still parked in Santa Fe, we tried to post the blog for yesterday, but Blogger was down.

The Miraculous Staircase

Next stop was the Pecos National Historical Park. It is a newer ruin, and has the remains of a church built around 1620.  Again, an interesting stop.

From there we took Route 3 down to I40.  3 was a narrow winding trail that after the house(okay, maybe there was more than one) in Villaneuva straightened out except for the ups and downs and eventually came to I40.  I guess the farm or two out there demands the road, otherwise there seemed to be no real purpose in it being there.

We went on to the next rest stop on I40, and stopped for the night.  If you look at a map and find Las Vegas, New Mexico, we were probably directly south of there on I40.  It is in the middle of nowhere and we could not get a mifi signal.  We still had not eaten, so fixed pizza in our rolling cave houses, then crashed.

Will get this posted when we can.