Santa Fe is on our short list of our most favorite places. There always seams to be something interesting going on and the scenery, weather and food are great. We came back this year mainly to go to the opera. They produce 5 operas a year and we attended 3 of them. It may be the best summer opera in the country with world class singers, directors and set designers.
One of the more unusual happenings at the opera is that it encourages, before each performance, tailgating. No, you don’t see Bubba standing over his barbeque with a beer in his hand cooking brats and hamburgers. What you see is people setting up a small table behind their SUV, covered with a white tablecloth, a vase of flowers and a bottle or two of wine. When you wander through the parking lot it looks as if you have stumbled onto some other bazaar planet. They have picnic tables around the outside of the parking lots and the opera even sells, in their gift shop, picnic baskets filled with every thing you need except the food. I believe that they will even provide the food if you have enough money.
We went for it in a big way. We took cups of coffee and a few cookies to eat while the parking lot cleared after the performance. Its hard to hold us old folks back.
The opera does not want any pictures taken of or in the opera house. One of my cameras is very small, less than hand size that I can easily carry in my pocket. I must have accidently left it in my pocket when we went to the opera, and it must have accidently gone off a few times when I transferred it from one pocket to the other. Anyway, that’s my story and I am sticking to it.
This is the view looking east from one of the outside balconies.
Another of our favorite activities while in Santa Fe is walking along the streets and looking at art galleries. We spent one morning on a 3/4 mile long section of Canyon Road, a famous, narrow, one lane, one-way street that is lined with nothing but art galleries and a few scattered restaurants.
We went to the farmers market. The following two photos are of the outside portion. The inside part is about as big as a basketball court. Most of the produce there was organically grown and expensive.
We were lucky to be in the area during the weekend of the Arts Fair on the Plaza. They block all traffic and construct a double row of booths on all four sides of the plaza with a few booths in the middle. There are artist there from all over the Southwest.
We moved on to Los Alamos, the Atomic City, but we did not stay there long enough to glow in the dark. In 1940, there was no town here, just a boys school for rich kids, when the government moved in and took over the area for the labs and housing of the Manhattan Project. Scientists. servicemen, and others from all over the country were approached by someone from the government, and told that they were wanted for a project. They were not told what the project was, where they were going or how long they would be gone. I wonder how many people today would volunteer for a job like that. Family members accompanied many of the scientists and officers, and eventually life became like many other towns across America—except here the atomic bomb was being developed.
The town and labs sit at the base of an extinct volcano on three mesas, separated by deep canyons that jut out from the mountain like three fingers sticking out from your hand.
We visited two museums there. The scientific displays in one were so far beyond me that I could hardly figure out what they were talking about. Both museums displayed fascinating pages from diaries and journals written by residents during the 1940s. It wasn’t until 1952 that Los Alamos became an “open city” when ordinary people could live and visit. At one time and perhaps even now, Los Alamos had the highest percentage of PhDs of their population of any city in the world. Interesting town to say the least.
The scenery around the area is outstanding.
Near Los Alamos is Bandelier National Monument. The area all around was at one time covered with a thick layer of volcanic ash. The ash turned into a soft rock. When the ancient Indians moved into the area they carved rooms into the rock and built rooms along the cliff face.
They also built a town on the valley floor like those you see all over the 4 corners region. The partial walls give an idea of the layout of the town.
The rock is so soft that the trails in parts of the monument have been worn into grooves.
If you want steps, just hack them out of the rock.
Some of us may be getting a bit to old for trails like this one. It had three ladders we had to scramble up and down. It is especially tough for someone like me that does not like ladders. This one must have been built by a very long legged person. The rungs were very far apart.
We moved north to Heron Lake State Park near Chama. This was the second time we had been there this summer. We needed a place to wait until the start of our stay in Taos, and Heron Lake was just right.
