Three Days in Santa Fe

We met up with our friends at Cochiti Lake and spent the next three days catching up and visiting Santa Fe.

We have stayed at Cochiti Lake in the past and have always liked this Corps of Engineers campground. There are two new areas within it that were built within the past few years. The sites are paved with concrete pads and roofed patios with a large table. Half of the new sites have electric and water and this is where we parked the last time we were here. This time it was all booked up. The other part of the new area is closer to the lake, but has no hookups. We happily chose this over the older electrified area far up on the hill. There were three sites together with great views and they were our place for four nights.

We spent the next three days going into Santa Fe each day, using Harry & Sally's Roadtrek. Not only could we fit six in it, albeit not quite legally, but it meant that Nina, the dog, was not left behind. We didn't actually see a great deal each day, but it was more than enough.

On Thursday, we made our way to the plaza in the center of town, finding a parking space right next to the Governor's Palace. One of the nice things about the palace is that there is a Native American artists market underneath the porch along the front. Registered individual artisans find a space each morning and lay out their wares on the ground. While the quality varied, many were quite skilled and many items were very well done. Although some of the commercial shops around the plaza had some very fancy, very expensive jewellry, you knew that what you were getting was made by the person selling it to you at the Palace market.

After the market sojourn, Tom & Jean wanted to visit the San Miguel Chapel, the oldest active church in the United States, dating back to about 1610. On the way there, however, we took the wrong street and just happened to pass by a shop, Native Sounds, selling Native American flutes. After much demonstration by the very talented proprietor, Sky Redhawk, Sally bought one, a cedar flute inlaid with turquoise.

I was the next one sidetracked. We passed the Loretto Chapel, a 19th century church. It has a very famous staircase, a spiral staircase built as a dual-helix without any external support. The story is that the nuns of the church needed a stairway to their choir loft. An unknown carpenter just showed up one day and offered to build it for them. By hand, he built this unsupported staircase over a few months then left without asking for payment. Supposedly, no one knows how it stays up, but others assert that it is just good engineering...built by an unknown carpenter with hand tools and no nails?

We finally made it to the San Miguel Chapel. It was very old, as was the talkative priest inside...an interesting visit.

It was time for lunch. Given the task of finding the lunch spot the night before, I came up with The Pantry. I was looking for the place we ate at back in the 90's when Ellen and I first visited, and this seemed to fit the bill. I'm not sure if it is the place, but it is a local favorite, not in the tourist area, highly recommended, and had great food. Everyone had a different dish and all were great. Mine was the "Christmas (Red and Green Chile)" Burrito.

As it was a late lunch, we decided to head back toward camp. The others needed a provisioning stop, so it was another stop at Whole Foods, then back to Cochiti Lake. With the huge lunch we had, it was pretty much just snacks for dinner.

On Friday, it was back to Santa Fe for a museum tour. Ellen and Sally, in particular, wanted to visit the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. We has seen it in our last trip to Santa Fe and it had a large collection of her works. Ellen is particularly fond of her work.

We, once again, found a parking spot right next to the museum. There was a special exhibition going on from a private collection of modernist art. This meant that a large part of the museum's O'Keeffe collection was not present. It was a bit disappointing—but not all was lost, much of it had been loaned to the New Mexico Museum of Art, just down the street, for a set of special exhibitions on Modernism that they were having. One was called O'Keeffe in Process. We traded in our O'Keeffe Museum tickets, for a combined two-museum ticket and off we went to the other museum.

On the way, we passed a photography gallery specializing in 20th century photographers. It had a collection of that included prints by Adams, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Evans and Weston. A stop there was a necessity.

The exhibition at the New Mexico Museum was a much more extensive selection of O'Keeffe's work and included some other works which were of O'Keefe, including several photographs by her husband, the photographer Alfred Steiglitz. That exhibit, along with their other exhibition "An American Modernism" were worth the visit.

Museumed out, it was time for lunch. Given the success of the previous day, the task fell to me. This time is was a little place near the center called El Palacio. Their menu was not as New Mexican as The Pantry, but had equally tasty food. On the way to the restaurant, we passed a jewelry shop called Somers, featuring jewelry designed by the sculptor, Somers Randolph, a childhood friend of Sally's. On the way back from lunch we stopped in and Sally spoke with Hillary, who gave Sally Somer's number. This led to our Saturday expedition.

From the shop. it was back to Native Sounds. Harry had been smitten by Sally's flute and wanted his own. Tom was also considering one. Harry bought two, one for himself and a little pocket flute for his grandson. Tom settled for a CD of Sky Redhawk's music.

Time, once again to head back to camp, stopping at a roadside seller of Piñon nuts for some genuine roasted piñon pine nuts, not the Chinese variety one finds in the supermarkets.

We didn't go directly back, but detoured to the town of Madrid, sort of a hippy throwback on the Turquoise Trail, the back route from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. It was an interesting place, an ex-coal mining town turned into art and curio shops. We perused a few of the shops, bought some excellent chocolate from a New York chef turned chocolatier and then took a cross-country drive to Cochiti Lake.

On Saturday, Tom & Jean left us. They had reservations at an RV park in Taos and wanted to spend a couple of days there before heading to Oklahoma and home to Massachusetts. We and Harry and Sally decided to spend another day and make a final visit to Santa Fe. We didn't go to the flute shop again; we did make one more stop at Whole Foods, but that was not the highlight of of the day.

Sally had been able to make contact with her old friend Somers and we stopped by his home and studio. He was entertaining several busloads of art tours on Saturday morning and we arrived just as the last one left. It was a warm reunion between two childhood friends who hadn't seen each other in 50+ years. We had quite a long visit to his home and studio, which was filled with his works. He is primarily a stone sculptor of abstract works and has worked in almost every stone imaginable. Just seeing his sculpture, studio and shop was pretty amazing. It was definitely the highlight of our visit to Santa Fe.

On leaving, Somers offhandedly suggested that we visit the folk art museum just up the hill from his house. It turned out that this was "Museum Hill" and there were actually several museums there, along with a cafe. It was lunchtime. We stopped at the cafe first and had yet another excellent lunch.

Of the four to choose from, we decided to visit the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. It was definitely worth the visit. We were particularly impressed by the gallery of southwestern pottery which not only presented the history of southwestern pottery making from the prehistoric to the modern. It also had an extensive collection of representative pieces from each of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona including examples from some of our favorite potters, Maria Martinez of the San Ildefonso Pueblo and Margaret Tafoya of the Santa Clara Pueblo.

Finally, we had overdosed on museums and made our way back to Cochiti Lake, with one final stop at Whole Foods.