A visit with a special lady and a little more 'gadget' history

Sante Fe Skies RV

Sante Fe, NM

March 7, 2015 to March 10, 2015

Santa Fe was not on our original bucket list, but I have an old friend that I wanted to visit with, so it worked.  Santa Fe sits at an elevation of 7,000 feet and surprisingly I felt it the first night.  We stayed at at a newer RV park called Santa Fe Skies.  The cost for 3 nights was $138.00 and the view was fantastic!  It sits high atop a mesa of sorts and you can see forever.  The skies were very dark even with the full moon.  The owner must be a metal sculptor as there are lots of unique pieces placed throughout the park.  There is a large dog park and a .75 mile walking track around the perimeter of the park.  We enjoyed this parks peace and quiet.

The first afternoon we went into Santa Fe looking for something to see and do.  I guess we just are touristed out at this point.  The downtown area was crowded and busy so we opted for a little drive around the square, a quick stop by the State Capital building and Trader Joe's to replenish the freezer with quick & easy meals.  We had completed a fairly short drive, but we were tired so a quiet peaceful night at home was just the ticket.  

The following morning we had to set our alarm clock for the first time in ages as we had a 3 hour drive to Raton to visit my friend Julia.  She wanted to meet for lunch at 11 and with daylight savings time, we were afraid we would oversleep, ha ha.  The ride along 25 north was pretty with a drop into the prairie land.  The ride was uneventful and took us exactly 3 hours for 175 miles.  Raton is a cute little town 7 miles south of the Colorado border.  I enjoyed visiting with Julia and her two nieces Barbara and Diana.  Julia will be celebrating her 104th birthday in July and still enjoys her bingo 3 days a week.  She gave up bowling after her 100th birthday.  We have been friends for a long time and I thought she looked great.  I’m going to miss her, but I told her we would back next year.  Barbara and Diana’s Dad was the Chief of Police in Raton for many years and both grew up there.  It is a sleepy little place and the ride into Colorado was beautiful.  We did the jump in to Colorado then turned around to head back to Santa Fe.  

On Barbara and Diana’s advice we took the Old Santa Fe Trail passed the NRA shooting range and Ted Turners buffalo ranch into Cimarron.  The ride through the canyons to Taos were beautiful and we got a little snow along the way.  It was a really nice ride and we saw turkeys, pronghorn and buffalo on our journey.  Whew what a long day as it was over 350 miles and an all day affair, but worth it to see friends and lovely scenery.

I have always wanted to see Los Alamos, home of the Manhattan Project.  We took the short drive up the steep hill to see what is left if anything of the original facility.  Unfortunately most of the buildings erected for the project were decontaminated and destroyed after the completion of the ‘gadget’.  What is left is the original Los Alamos Boys Ranch School and the homes along Bathtub Row.  They were called that as they were the only homes with bathtubs in them and were originally built for the faculty of the Boys school.  Oppenheimer stayed in one of these homes at the corner of Bathtub Row and Peach Street.  The Lodge was built in 1928 as the dining hall for the Boys school.  This school was for wealthy parents to send their boys where they took care of horses, did calisthenics every morning and slept in outdoor porches year round.  This site was taken over by the US Government for housing for some of the 2,500 scientists that would work on the ‘gadget’.  

One of the buildings was built as an infirmary in 1918 and was later used as a guest cottage for both the school and later was General Leslie R Groves cottage during the Project.  General Groves was Commander of the Manhattan Engineer District and he is the one who selected Oppenheimer to be the director of the project.  We learned at this free little museum in this building that this site, the site in Oak Ridge and Hanford were being turned over to the National Park Service.  It will be interesting to see if any changes are made.  

J. Robert Oppenheimer is credited with selecting Los Alamos for the location of Project Y.  It was on a high mesa with only one way in and the boys school was there for housing a few scientists.  The owner of the school, Ashley Pond, was advised that he needed to vacate the school and shortly afterwards, the town grew to over 2,500.  Individuals working on the gadget couldn’t tell anyone where they were going and had to leave their lives behind for 2 years.  Driver’s license’s were issued to #’s only with a Santa Fe address.  Any children born on the hill were given a birthplace of PO Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM.  Again I am amazed this secrecy held and none caught on to the real reason for the high concentration of scientists, physicists and engineers.  

After the successful detonation at the Trinity site in July 1945, most of the individuals left, returning to their former lives.  It was determined that if we could harness this nuclear energy for good this would be the spot to continue working on this energy source.  A bridge was built across the wide deep canyon and the Los Alamos National Laboratory was moved to the next mesa.  Today LANL is a scientific research laboratory focusing on national security and employs over 10,000.  They work on vaccines for diseases like HIV and created the cameras launched with Mars Rover that can ‘photograph’ a rock and decipher it’s organic makeup.  Smart people!  

We made a brief stop at the Bradbury Science Museum and watched a short video about Los Alamos and wandered around.  The cost of this museum was also free.  While we were visiting there, we had an ah ha moment.  We have seen where the uranium was separated in Tennessee to create the bomb, where the scientists worked on the bomb’s creation, where it was detonated, the plane Fat Boy was dropped from and many years ago Eric was in Tinian on a Boy Scout outing when he lived in Guam.  When we were in Hawaii last year we visited the Mighty Missouri where the Japanese signed their surrender.  I think we have seen just about everything we could see with the exception of the Hanford site in Washington where the plutonium was processed regarding the Manhattan Project.  It is a very interesting chapter in our history and if we had failed so many more lives would have been lost. 

On to our next stop-The Grand Canyon!   

A little stop in Las Cruces, NM

Las Cruces, NM

March 4, 2015 to March 7, 2015

Being chased by cold drizzly rain again we headed farther west to Las Cruces, NM.  We stayed at an over 55 park called Sunny Skies RV.  The cost for 3 nights was $108.  It was fairly quiet, but there was nightly train nearby and it was a little harder to navigate the city streets to get to.  Most folks there were there for the winter with only a few transient spots.  All in all it was an ok place to stay.

We headed out to White Sands Missile Range just east of Las Cruces to visit their museum.  You stop at the gate and go in for clearance and to obtain a pass.  The museum is located near the front gates and has a static display of various rockets tested at the range including scud busters, patriot missiles, even the Redstone rocket that Alan Shepard sat atop as he blasted off in Mercury 1, the first blast off in the space race.  They have a nice museum that included a diorama of the McDonald Ranch located at the Trinity site where they did the final assembly of the ‘gadget’ created at Los Alamos, 200 miles north.  

The security gate

could this really be a circuit board?

The Gadget

The ranch used for the Trinity detonation test

A Scud Buster

Fat Man 

Not an alien spacecraft

Redstone Rocket 

I learned that the Space Shuttle Columbia landed there in 1982 as an alternate site from Edwards due to weather.  They had displays of emergency fall out shelter supplies and the measuring/recording devices used in the various missile tests.  We spent a little while there reading all the information.  It was a nice museum and displays.  They had a small book/gift shop.  

 We headed to Alamogordo for lunch in search of Mexican Food   We enjoyed a couple of lunch specials at Margo’s Mexican of enchiladas and chile relenos.  I had the green sauce, Eric had the red.  Both were very good!  After we were full we visited a pistachio farm home of the world’s largest pistachio.  We sampled every kind of flavored pistachio and even chocolate chile covered.  Yummy, but how much can we keep eating?  We selected a bag of plain and a bag of lemon/lime and called it good.  We tend to spend less on junk food if we are full!

On the way home we stopped by White Sands National Monument.  White Sands is a 275 square mile desert of gypsum, the largest in the world.  It is a sea of white sand and is always changing due to winds.  We hiked along the dunes and I was surprised that it felt like sugar crystals.  Plants grow out of the dunes and the yucca’s look pretty cool against the white backgrounds.  There is lots to do here in the summer with ranger led walks on full moon nights, sunset strolls, sunrise photography sessions and bike rides on full moon nights.  These all sound like fun if you time your visit just right.

A visit to the little historic town of Mesilla was in order to see the little square and the San Albino Basilica.  We did a little shopping around the square and we both wanted some hand blown glass wine glasses.  We asked if they could wrapped them really good and they assured us they could.  We splurged on them for when we ever settle down and get a house.  An old friend of Eric’s suggested we try Andelay’s for lunch.  We both got the carbon tacos and has plenty left over.  They were very good and we even saved room for the sopapillas.  So good!  We stopped into their mercantile and picked up some green chile tamales.  I can’t wait to try them.  

Fancy new glasses

Billy the Kid was transported from Mesilla to Lincoln where he escaped

We made a little westward detour to cross over the Rio Grande.  I was sad to see it so low, it was a trickle.  As we went further north around Taos and Sante Fe, it was larger and running faster.  

We paid a visit to a manufactured housing dealer near the RV park just to see what they look like and get an idea of the cost.  That may be our exit strategy from full timing, but not yet!  We are still having so much fun and we are not ready to settle anywhere!

Las Cruces is not my idea of a destination, but we enjoyed our visit here.  There was lots to see and do and it was on the way to Santa Fe, next on the adventure!