Santa Fe to Amarillo

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October 17th 2015

Published: November 10th 2017

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bobstacytrips

At Bandelier Monument

Geo: 35.222, -101.831

We got up on Friday morning and drove to Los Alamos. This is where they designed and built the first atom bomb and the 2 bombs that they dropped on Japan. There is still a huge facility there doing research on all kinds of things.
People were assigned to go there in the early forties and were only given an address in Santa Fe to report to. Once they reported in they were told how to get to Los Alamos. Their driver's licenses didn't have names on them, only a number. If someone was born there, their birth certificate showed a P.O. Box in Santa Fe as their birth place. People who lived around the area didn't even know that a huge facility had been built on top of the plateau.
We visited the Bradbury Science Museum. It had lots of stuff about the designing and building of the bombs. Then we went to the Los Alamos Historical Museum. It had info on the early Pueblo Indians that lived on the plateau, all the way to dioramas of what living conditions were like during the military operations.
On the way home, we stopped at Bandelier National Monument.

One of the caves

We went on a 1.2 mile hike to some early Pueblo buildings and cliff caves, complete with some artwork on the walls. The earliest people there lived about the 1200's. The place was abandoned around the 1600's. They believe that they either had an extended drought or were scared off by early settlers.
This morning, we left Santa Fe and headed for Amarillo, Tx. We stopped in Tucumcari at the Mesolands Dinosaur Museum. It is run by the local community college. It had a lot of info and actual skeletons of many dinosaurs that the students had dug up. We also made a quick stop at the Route 66 Museum. It had a lot of pictures of gas stations, restaurants and hotels that were open in the 50's along Route 66. They had some nice restored old cars there, too.
After all that, we finished our drive to Amarillo. Looks like we have done over 1700 miles so far.
Tomorrow we attack Dallas. We stay for 2 nights.

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