More pictures – less words today… just want to get the blog post done so we can go check out more local attractions today 🙂
On Monday, we drove into Santa Fe to check out some of the downtown attractions. Stilla especially wanted to see more of the churches. (Click on the link above for info on Santa Fe from my friend WIkipedia®).
We parked in one of the downtown parking lots and paid $6 for three hours. Then we walked over to the Cathedral Basilica of St Francis of Assisi. In yesterdays blog, I incorrectly identified this church as the one with the famous spiral staircase.
We found out that the church with the famous spiral staircase was around the corner as evidenced by this sign (below) on the post in front of the Cathedral Basilica of St Francis of Assisi. So we followed the signs and went into nearby Loretta Chapel.
Here’s the Loretto Chapel. (Click the link for history on this attraction).
This is the famous Loretto Chapel staircase. This amazing spiral staircase has two 360 degree turns and no visible means of support. It is said that the staircase was built without nails—only wooden pegs.
More pictures inside the Loretto Chapel…
These banisters and rails were added ~10 years after the staircase was built. (Click HERE for more from Wikipedia®)
This is what the original staircase looked like before the banisters / handrails were installed.
After checking out the chapel with the famous spiral staircase, we walked back over to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi…
After our tours of the local churches, we wandered around the downtown area and soaked in the sights…
We found a nice place to have lunch which included chicken green chili stew and a “world-famous” frito pie. Yumm 🙂
We also did a little shopping. Stilla found a good deal on a couple of earrings and I bought a cool Route-66 Santa Fe T-shirt, (because you can never have too many t-shirts, right?) 🙂
We wanted to take one of the local sightseeing tours (see sign below) but when we showed up 10 minutes early for the tour, we found that they depart early when they get full. Do you see the small print below the departure times in red (below) 🙁 Ten minutes wasn’t early enough…
We should have taken a tour in one of these instead of the trolley tram… but, !$!
We walked through the old town plaza…
and saw the end of the Santa Fe Trail marker…
and then we checked out the chapel gardens on our way back to the parking lot…
When we got back to the Elks Lodge, little Coach was ready for a looong walk. This is the infamous hidden entrance to the lodge with the overhanging trees (below) that I wrote about in my post yesterday.
We closed out the evening with a visit inside the lodge and paid the nice bartender for our camping spot here in the parking lot / field. We paid a $15 (donation) for three nights because we want to spend another night here and leave on Wednesday. This is a very nice lodge with very nice people… our second drinks were free per lodge tradition. Unfortunately they don’t have any food at this lodge so we had to go back to the Coach to make dinner.
Check back tomorrow to see what we get into… There’s a lot of museums here to check out and also we read about some nice driving tours up north of here 🙂