Monday, June 24, 2013 – Day 11 – Santa Fe & Los Alamos,
NM
Yet ANOTHER great day, this one more laid back and relaxing
than previous days. I didn’t leave the
hotel until 9 AM and I took a short ride to The Plaza in old Santa Fe. Santa Fe is a lovely city with lots of adobe
buildings and a tradition of going well out of it’s way to respect it’s
roots. They have done an excellent job.
Two things about this place.
First, it is very historic and charming.
Second, for those of you who love to shop, there is nothing for you here
… just a few small, poorly stocked shops … OK, I cannot tell a lie. This place is a shopper’s paradise and
actually, I did shop. After all, I needed
to take time to get some gifts for the fam.
Yes Patti, Diane and Inta, there are shops UNDERNEATH the shops you can visit at street level |
While I was there, I attended a ceremony for a local hero of
the Iraq war who was just awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and unlike
most of these heroes his was not awarded posthumously. It was an honor to be there.
After stopping by the post office to send the gifts back
home, I set out for Los Alamos. This was
the place where the atomic bomb was developed in the mid-1940’s. For those of you who don’t like math, that’s
about 70 years ago. For people like me
who are in our mid-60’s, that’s a scary thought. Anyway, the site where the first nuke was
detonated is a few miles away from Los Alamos and is only open to the public
twice annually, so I didn’t see the blast site.
I don’t suppose I missed much – just a huge expanse of arid high desert
with a lot of glass fused from sand during the explosion.
It's a bit of a hill climb getting to Los Alamos |
As far as the town goes, it amazing the difference 70 years can make. This place went from a bunch of Army barracks to an absolutely charming city in the high desert mountains. It’s an beautiful, eclectic little town. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories just outside of San Francisco runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory and I was talking to a physicist who moved here from California. He said he will never leave because he and the wife can’t think of a better place to live. He also said that there is a huge number of millionaires per capita here because all of the high powered scientists employed at Los Alamos labs. Seems they retire and never leave. It really is a special place, especially considering how it was started by US Army Major General Leslie Groves for the express purpose of developing the weapon that ended World War II (let's don't forget Dr. Robert Oppenheimer who actually managed the scientific development of the bomb. For you history buffs, Major General Groves was also the chief architect of The Pentagon. If you want to see a great movie about this, get "Fat Man and Little Boy", starring Paul Newman.
On the way back, I snapped a few pix of yet another major
forest fire in the Southwest. These
states are really getting hit hard and this is a major fire. Look at the size of that smoke cloud.
Back to the hotel after all this for a shower and then
dinner after only clocking about 150 miles today. Tomorrow, Taos.