First Officers Log: Day 7, The Atomic City

Day 7: The Atomic City



There was this crazy lightning storm late last night. You could see these bitchin bolts shooting down from behind the mountains in the distance. The Old Man got up at 5:45 AM MDT, to try and watch the sunrise. I of course slept in a bit and didn’t get up till 7:45, which was nice for a change seeing that I normally don’t get up before 8:00 am when I’m back home. The day is started with another continental breakfast, and as far continental breakfasts go this was the worst. We leave the Econo Lodge in Tucumari, NM and head west to Los Alamos to see the birthplace of the Atomic Bomb!

We drive through an endless sea of mesa’s and rock formations. Little red spurts of colored rock shine out amongst a see of green and white. The plains stretch out for what seems like hundreds of miles till a mesa stops them. The further we go the harder it is to judge how far off in the distance the rocks are. We have turned this into a game, guess how far away that rock is. I suck at this game but I’ve actually guessed right a couple of times.



On one of our last stretches of Rt 66 we stop at the Route 66 auto museum, not much to tell here except, I love cars and they had some bitchin ones. Pappy was excited because the had a whole slew of Mustangs. I felt bad Newton (that's our ride if I havent mentioned before) had to sit in the parking lot.




On the way into Santa Fe, we slowly merge with civilization again. The buildings blend almost seamlessly with the landscape at first then slowly it becomes more urban. We pass through Santa Fe and eventually arrive at Los Alamos. Our first destination is this junkyard I found called the Black Hole. They sell mostly discarded stuff from the old Los Alamos Labs. There is cryogenic freezing vessels, huge capacitors, various switches and control boards, all sorts of test tubes and containers, file cabinets, and even a few bomb shells. Most random thing I think I saw was a huge stack of bowling balls (which just seemed out of place here.) Pappy bought a couple of capacitors, and I got some old cans of D-76 and Acufine developed, an old darkroom timer, and a brownie video camera!



The Los Alamos museum was cool, we saw reproductions of the Fat Man and Little Boy that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was a lot of info on the creation of the bombs, dark matter and the solar system. Being a science dork Pappy was really getting in to it all which is good for me cause he explains it all to me.

After that it was a quick loop through, Bandelier National Park and off to the hotel in Grant, NM.

Random coolness we saw on the road, they were transporting a wind turbine blade on the back of a semi. Pretty cool if you ask me, those things are way bigger than they seem on the windmills.


That’s all for today folks. Tomorrow it’s off to the Painted Desert and overnight in the Grand Canyon so there should be lots of cool pictures there.

Vaya Con Dios!