New Mexico Touring, and back to Taos area

On Tuesday we decided to check out life in the city, first heading sort of south to Santa Fe. In particular, Cathie wanted to visit the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum there. 

Here's a pic of the Rio Grande river along the highway. The Rio Grande is quite a pretty river around here, with lots of fishing activity:

 
We made it to the museum, but unfortunately couldn't get parked there at all. Apparently there are parking garages in the area. We didn't spot them, but they usually don't work for the van anyway. The surface parking in the area was full. This was about 10:30 am, likely a normal day around here. Lots of traffic.

I expect Santa Fe can be a nice city to visit, but cities in general are not for us. Of course it would be better to camp somewhere you can get transit into the city and leave the rv parked, even a relatively small one like ours. That would take planning and preparation though! 😝

Then we because we're bears for punishment, we headed to Albuquerque, mostly to see what the famous Balloon Festival is all about. We expected it to be busy, but we just sort of bounced right off. We accidentally got in the back way to one of the 8 large RV parking areas. All 8 areas were fully booked with advance reservations. The one we got into had likely hundreds of large RVs parked already, with another 50+ expected later that day. Again, not for us. Due to weather, there were likely going to be no balloon flights for a couple of days. We headed for the hills.

In this case the hills were in the Santa Fe National Forest, west of Santa Fe. Heading over that way, the weather looked pretty threatening:

We checked weather forecasts and continued on though, checking road conditions once we got in the hills. The storm was fast-moving, heading for Taos we think. Conditions were fine after all, although wet in places:

We started seeing a nice rainbow, doubled at times

Some water over the road in places

As much mud as water really

It reminded us a lot of a time in Palo Duro park in Texas one rainy day. Remember that J&C?

We stopped for the night in the Vista Linda campground, one of a number of small campgrounds and day use (ie fishing) areas along the Jemez River. Vista Linda has a dozen or so sites, well wooded, some with casitas or shelters. No hookups at sites, just central vault toilets and a couple of water taps. $10/night. It was a beautiful peaceful night, at least peaceful after one inconsiderate fellow finally shut off his generator about 8pm (it had been on since about 5, the next site over from us).

Claret Cup cacti

The hill cliffs across the road in the evening sun

Here's a map of Tuesday's drive:

 

Tuesday evening I'd been chatting with a US full-time RVer named John. He's equipped for pretty much anything, accompanied by his Black Lab.

Here's his travel/living outfit. An Alaska pop-up camper on a 1-ton 4x4 truck, a Honda trail bike on a front rack, a bicycle, and a mid-sized older Airstream trailer:

On Wednesday we worked our way back to the same camp area we'd been in Tuesday night. We decided that with the long weekend coming up, we want to be set up somewhere for at least most of the weekend.

It's a really pretty drive from the Jemez Springs area back to Taos.

Bandolier National Monument is along the way, an area I'd heard of but didn't know much about. Apparently it has a lot of archeological interest, but we decided not to stay there for the night. Likely a good thing as it turned out.

We continued on to the village of Chimayo. Cathie picked up some woven mats there for a good price, likely for small place mats:

 

In the area is the Santuario De Chimayo, an historic and still active Catholic church:

Amazing carved doors, 8 ft high or more

It was still pretty early in the day, but we decided to head for the campground. We've both been dealing with colds, and they are wearing us down a bit.

First we checked out the camp we stayed at the night before. Still available, but we decided to check for vacancies at the Rio Bravo campground just up the road, the one with the showers. There was a nice spot open so we signed up for 4 nights, a total of $28 for the 4 nights. No hookups but heated washrooms again, this time with the $1 pay showers, and a nice view out the back. 

This is likely the largest of the little group of campgrounds along the Rio Grande river here, this one with about 15 sites. About half are unserviced "tenting" sites like ours, and half are RV sites with water and electric. 

I mentioned it was a good thing we headed here early today. The cg filled up not long after we got there, and a fair number of vehicles have visited, looking for sites. It might be a busy weekend.

Here's a map of Wednesday's drive: