SANTA FE AND LAKE COCHITI

With recommendations from our friends Freddy and Delcie and Mike and Julie, we thought we would try our first Corps of Engineers campsite.  We arrived at Lake Cochiti, New Mexico Thursday afternoon.  

View from the gatehouse - Lake Cochiti

Lake Cochiti is a reservoir.  The dam is the 10th largest earth filled dam in the US.  It is five and a half miles long.  It is built to control the Rio Grande river.
Huh, we did not expect to see the Rio Grande river in northern New Mexico.

Today we decided to take the city bus from the south end of Santa Fe all the way to the terminus in the old town of Santa Fe.  The fare, a buck, for both ways!  The bus trip itself was an adventure.

We were way out of our price range in the touristy part of the city but it was fun.  We came away with a t-shirt purchased in a store that is mostly original and built in 1603.

The store now.  The alley is called Burro Alley and it is the street in the next photo.

The store then.  The alley in the first picture was the street in this one.

One of the highlights was the Chuck Jones gallery. Chuck Jones was an American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films, most memorably of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio. He directed many classic animated cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Pepé Le Pew, Porky Pig and a slew of other Warner characters.

Naturally we could not take pictures inside the gallery.  Some of the original paintings ran in the tens of thousands of dollars.   This photo is outside on the Daffy Duck bench.

 
As we were about to head for the bus back to Lake Cochitti we found the outside market.  At least the prices here were a little more reasonable.  

 The area in the last picture has been set aside for the Navejo craftsmen for 100's of years.  I did get a nice necklace.