Well it has been a jammed packed 2 days!!! We started out Thursday doing a few church things. We visited the oldest church in the United States, which interestingly enough is next to the oldest house in the United States. One has to wonder which came first, the house or the church!

From there we went to a church by the name of the Loretto Chapel. The cliff note version is this: It's a chapel that was built in 1850 or so by the Loretto nuns who traveled from KY. The staircase has no means of support therefore it is the gravity defying staircase.
Somewhere toward the end of construction they realized they did not have a way to get to the choir loft. Long story short, the nuns prayed a novena. On the last day of the novena, a bearded old man carrying a few simple tools and leading a donkey, offering his skills as a carpenter. Although the sisters apparently did not know the man, they promptly employed him, evidently convinced that their novena had been answered. For several months, shielded from the nuns’ view, the old carpenter worked in seclusion, shaping and forming the wood and fastening joints with wooden pegs.
Finally, they saw the results, and realized that it was a woodworker’s masterpiece. Inexplicably, when the nuns sought to thank and pay the bearded old carpenter, they found that he had vanished without a word. They could find no trace of him. They even offered a reward to anyone who could identify and locate the carpenter. But he had simply disappeared. The nun began to wonder whether the bearded old carpenter who answered their novena might have been St. Joseph himself. That's the story, you decide!!!

We went into old town Santa Fe and walked around. What a magnificent area,

We went to a little store called the Rainbow Man. where I encountered a large ostrich. In the back of the store is Oppenheimers office. Back in WWII scientists would enter through the front door and be taken out the back door and bused to Los Alamos to build the bomb.

Yesterday we went on the road and were able to click off about 5 or 6 attractions. Including Camel Rock, a rock formation that looks like a camel. We then went to Grants and Gallup New Mexico were there was a plethora of attractions including the Route 66 drive through neon sign, the Kachina statue, the Galoop, a big round thing that has no purpose, the Navajo code whisperer, and of course the tow truck on top of a tower. A few miles down the road from that is the Indian statue with large arrows. Unfortunately the Muffler man is gone.

Just so you know when you take the road less traveled you may find yourself on the corner of Winslow Arizona. And of course there I was the girl next to the flatbed Ford!! Fred said to me we may lose or we may win but we will never be here again, so we took a bunch of pictures!! What fun we are having!!