Boondocking and Back Again - Santa Fe part 2
Our second week in Santa Fe was a treat, because I got to take time off. I was due for some vacation time and this area was so delightful that it seemed like a great opportunity.
Our boondocking spot was outside of town to the NW, set into the foothills near Caja del Rio in the Santa Fe National Forest. Much of that first day was windy, though, making it a "boondusting" experience. This made me nervous as the last time we went boondocking was at Winterhaven, where we endured a hellish windstorm that pushed dust in places we're still cleaning up. The forecast here, however, was for the wind to die down for the rest of the week and thankfully that proved true.
What we did not expect was snow! Tuesday overnight we got about an inch or two of snow, which coated the dusty scrub forest in a beautiful white blanket for most of the morning.
Thursday we headed to Bandelier (pronounced "band-o-lear", not "ban-delly-a", it turns out) National Monument to see the ancient cliff dwellings. This meant a beautiful drive out past Los Alamos into the canyons and cliffs about an hour outside of town. This whole region is just gorgeous with endlessly varying rock formations, changing trees and skies, and vivid light. Bandelier itself is very special indeed, with hundreds of dwellings still carved in the cliff face by the Ancestral Pueblo people. Unlike at National Parks, National Monuments often let you touch and see, and this was no exception. Many of the dwellings had ladders leading up to them, and you could just climb right in!
What we see today on the cliffside would have been the very back room of the original houses. They would also have built up stone and brick in front of the cliff face to make a more room-like dwelling with flat roofs and square rooms. There were a couple rebuilt ones that we could see but not enter.
On Friday we went back to Santa Fe Skies to clean up and refresh. Since we were now closer to town, on Saturday we headed back into old Santa Fe to see destinations we missed the first time. Theme for this day was history. First up was the "oldest house" and "oldest church."
The oldest house is probably the oldest still-used house in the US, in continuous use since about 1646 AD. It's now a museum and gift shop and has seen many changes over the years with floors and rooms added, removed, and rebuilt many times to serve changing needs.
The oldest church is San Miguel Church, built on land in continuous religious use since about the 1300s, first by the native peoples of the region, then by Spanish Catholic missionaries, and now by a local Catholic high school as a working chapel. It has also been rebuilt several times, but always as a church, and retains much of its original shape and spirit.
It was closed for Covid, holding neither masses nor tours, so we walked around the outside to see what we could. As we came around the side, two men walked out the door as they wrapped up a meeting, and one turned to us and asked, "would you like a tour?" YES! So we were treated to a private tour of Mission San Miguel, and even got to ring the famous bell. An unexpected and delightful gift, I love these super old buildings where nothing is square and everything is handmade out of what they had. No building codes here, just whatever looked good to the worker.
From there we went to a completely opposite experience, the Cathedral of St Francis, a very refined 1800s cathedral that is now the big Catholic church downtown. Beautiful in a very different way, and interesting to see in the context of - this is the sort of church architecture the people who oversaw the construction of San Miguel were thinking of and trying to replicate in the New World. But all they had was adobe and a few timbers... so they did what they could. 100 years later things had developed enough to make something much more refined.
After waiting longer than we would like for lunch - but having it be so tasty we didn't complain - we headed over to the Palace of the Governors, which is now part of the New Mexico History Museum. The Palace, sadly, was closed for remodeling so we didn't get go in that. But the museum exhibits on NM and Santa Fe history were excellent and vividly told the story of this place and the many people groups that have called it home over the centuries. I took few photos here as the exhibits don't shoot well, but we enjoyed it thoroughly and really felt like I got a good, broad perspective on the long history here.
Sunday, at Kristin's hairdresser's suggestion, we headed up to the tiny community of Chimayo to see the Christ of Esquipulas Chapel. Unlike the churches we toured on Saturday, this isn't really a historically or architecturally significant location, but a Catholic pilgrimage site. While we were there to enjoy the history, everyone else there was there on business. The ground the church was built on has legendary healing properties, and many come to pray for healing for themselves and others. Nearby there is a chapel dedicated to children, probably the only one in the world, that was just delightful.
Monday was a big event. There is an art group here in Santa Fe called Meow Wolf, and they have a huge installation in an old bowling alley called the House of Eternal Return. It's been closed for a year due to COVID , but it opened just during our stay, and we managed to get tickets. This experience defies description, imagine a building-sized immersive art exhibit that can be enjoyed on many levels - as art, as a story, as experiment. Everything was super well-executed, and rewarded investigation, prying, poking, and climbing into.
We were sad to leave Santa Fe and would love to come back. There's so much to explore that was closed or we just didn't have time to see, and everything we did see was so engaging and surprising! A trip highlight city so far.
