Tag Archives: Elks Lodge 460

Touring Downtown Santa Fe (Elks Lodge 460 – Santa Fe, NM)

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.

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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.

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Here’s the Loretto Chapel.  (Click the link for history on this attraction).

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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.

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More pictures inside the Loretto Chapel…

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These banisters and rails were added ~10 years after the staircase was built.  (Click HERE for more from Wikipedia®)

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This is what the original staircase looked like before the banisters / handrails were installed.

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After checking out the chapel with the famous spiral staircase, we walked back over to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi

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The cathedral was built by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy between 1869 and 1886 on the site of an older adobe church.

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After our tours of the local churches, we wandered around the downtown area and soaked in the sights…

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We found a nice place to have lunch which included chicken green chili stew and a “world-famous” frito pie.  Yumm 🙂

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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?)  🙂

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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…

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We should have taken a tour in one of these instead of the trolley tram… but, !$!

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We walked through the old town plaza…

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and saw the end of the Santa Fe Trail marker…

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and then we checked out the chapel gardens on our way back to the parking lot…

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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.

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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 🙂

Bad Moon Rising & Trip to Santa Fe (Elks Lodge 460 – Santa Fe, NM)

We left Storrie Lake SP around noon and plugged the Las Vegas, NM KOA into our iPhone for directions… which was mistake # 1.

After we took exit 339 off I-25 just south of Las Vegas, the iPhone said to turn left over the highway and then left again on the frontage road, “your destination is 700 feet” Siri said.  Well, the destination was actually to the right along the frontage road!?!  And most of you know what it’s like trying to do a U-turn in a big rig 🙁  I had to go at least a couple miles before I could turn around.  In hindsight, there was a sign for the KOA after the exit but I didn’t see it in time – darn google maps 🙁  I probably should have used our Rand McNally  RVND™ 7720 GPS, but it’s just so darn complicated sometimes to plug in a destination.

And then, mistake # 2 was trusting the iPhone app for dump stations which turned us on to this KOA in the first place.  I think I incorrectly stated in yesterday’s blog that it was their website that told us about the dump station, but it was an iPhone app that Stilla has on her phone that we had consulted.  The app said the cost for dumping at that particular KOA was only $5.  The clerk behind the counter told me it was $15!?! – darn iPhone apps and expensive KOAs  🙁  If I would have known before-hand that it was $15, I wouldn’t have stopped here because we were only 1/4 full on the grey tank and the black tank wasn’t even registering yet.  We dumped before we left Colorado Springs only 5 days ago.  We have a combined capacity on the tanks of 178 gallons, (100 black and 78 grey).  It’s just that we knew we would be dry-camping at the Elks in Santa Fe and wanted to start off empty.  At least the clerk gave us a $5 discount when I showed my military ID.

After dumping our tanks, we continued on to our next adventure of the day…

We headed south towards Santa Fe and passed a lot of smoke from a nearby forest fire on the north side of I-25. We followed the iPhone map (I know, I just don’t learn) to the Elks Lodge and took the first exit into Santa Fe, NM along Old Pecos Trail.

We found the Elks Lodge easily enough – sitting on top of a hill, but we weren’t sure how to get there.

Once again, the iPhone google maps feature didn’t show enough detail to tell us where the entrance was, and unfortunately the lodge didn’t have any signs posted. 🙁   We passed one small road that looked like it might go up the hill to the lodge but it winded through some overhanging trees and looked too narrow… then we passed a second small road but it was a sharp right turn that we couldn’t make while towing the Silverado.  Then we passed a third road after we went past the lodge but it clearly went into a residential area and the iPhone map showed a lot of cul-de-sacs, I definitely didn’t want to get stuck in there.  Along came a fourth road that had signs for Museum Hill, and I thought, hey – museums usually have room for RVs so let’s turn here and maybe we can unhook the Silverado and go scout out the entrance to the lodge.  Well, that didn’t work out too well because the museum(s) were clearly farther away as more signs indicated.  So, we were finally able to make a few left-hand turns in a residential area and got back on Old Pecos Trail.  We went past the lodge again on the divided road and the two roads that looked the ‘most-likely’ to be the entrances to the lodge parking area taunted me as we drove past.

We ended up going all the way back to the highway to find a wide enough spot to unhook the Silverado and turn around again.   This time, Stilla led the way back in the Silverado with her phone in hand.  She turned at the first narrow entrance road that had all the trees around it and called to let me know this was it.  I barely maneuvered through the trees without scratching the sides of the Coach and drove up the hill on the narrow entrance road to a large field; (let’s call it a parking area).

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We picked a nice spot in the corner after our 70 mile trip for the day.

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Parked at Elks Lodge 60 in Santa Fe, NM.
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View towards Elks Lodge from in front of our Coach.

After getting set up, we walked around the lodge…

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A lady peeked out the back door to tell us that the lodge was closed for the day (Sunday) and that they (a small group) had it reserved for a baby shower.  So we’ll just have to wait until Monday to go inside and pay for our spot.

We downloaded the bicycles off the back of the Silverado and headed into town to check things out.

We stopped at San Miguel Church, reportedly the oldest church in the USA.  (don’t forget to click on the link to learn more from Wikipedia®)

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And we checked out the oldest house, the De Vargas Street House.

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Then we had pizza and salad at Upper Crust Pizza, right next to the mission church.

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We then drove further into town to get oriented.

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We’ll stop at this church later (maybe on Monday).  It’s supposed to have a really cool spiral staircase that was handmade without using any nails.

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On the way back to the lodge we drove back up to Museum Hill (near the Elks Lodge).  The museums were already closed for the day but we stopped at this sculpture to take a few pics…

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Then we returned to the Coach and ran the generator for a while to charge the batteries while we watched some TV and took pictures of the ‘super blood moon’ eclipse

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Pretty cool pics, eh?

Gotta run now… check back to see what we did on Monday 🙂