Winnebago Voyage: Monday's day-trip

We wanted to make a day-trip north of Santa Fe, but weren't sure where to go. We needed to get an Arizona map, so stopped by the AAA office in Santa Fe and got some travel information in addition to our map.

We had found a flyer on Nambe Falls, and thought we would go there, but it cost $15 just to drive around the lake, so we declined! There were two short hikes, but one was very steep and the other had you walk through water a foot deep, so those were out!

The next stop was at the New Mexico Wildlife Center, which, of course, was way more interesting to me than to Tommie! There was one shady parking spot, so he stayed in the car with Baxter while I made a quick tour. They have a wonderful building, two full-time paid rehabbers, two volunteer part-time vets, four summer interns, and lots of volunteers!...made me envious! They have a trail around the raptor cages for their education birds, but said the songbird nursery was too hectic now to let me see it.

Next, we drove on highway 502, aiming for Valles Caldera National Preserve. Our highway approached a line of gates that looked like toll booths, and we didn't understand what that was all about! Turns out that they were gates to guard the entrance to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which the highway runs through. The guard had to see my drivers license and told us that we would be going through about 4 miles of the laboratory land and photos were not allowed. Of course, I had to take just one, anyway!

When we exited the laboratory grounds, we headed up the mountains through the Bandelier National Monument. There are lots of dead trees which were killed by the drought and others that were blown over by a microburst in March of this year. The Valles Caldera is a huge valley depression and there is a 2-mile dirt road leading to the visitor center. No trees grow around the hills, and the ranger said that's because the lower land used to be a lake and is still too boggy to grow trees.

When we left there, we headed west and then south through Hémez Springs which is a nice artsy little town. Hémez Pueblo is next on the road and is pretty messy and run down. But after that, there was spectacular scenery with brilliant red rocks! Below that, we hit I-25 again and headed back into Santa Fe.

After dinner we walked around our campground and took pictures of a lot of the metal sculpture art that's here.