The Story

Beginning on June 14, 2013, I'll be starting a 6,000 mile ride taking me through Canada, the Black Hills of South Dakota, Wyoming, the ridge of the Rockies from Estes Park, CO to Santa Fe, NM, the Four Corners area of Utah, the Ozarks, the Smokies and back home. States I'll be riding through: New York, Ontario (Canada), Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

This blog will follow that adventure on a frequent (hopefully daily) basis. This means that everyone can skip the slide show when I return! Enjoy.

Monday, June 24, 2013

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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.