Sunday, July 19, 2009

Our Los Alamos Trip

I've been meaning to post about our trip to Los Alamos but never got around to it until now....

Here is a slide show of some pictures we took while we were there. It might be really boring because it's mostly scenery, but since Jason was interviewing and I was the only one with a camera, that's how it ended up!




Back in April our family travelled to Los Alamos, New Mexico so that Jason could visit the laboratories there and meet some work colleagues. We stayed 2 days, and the kids and I drove around exploring the area. There's not much there, but the kids and I hiked Bandolier National Park and it was really cool, so that is what most of our pictures are from. Los Alamos geographically is a tiny town centred around the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) on a plateau of land - a mesa - 7000 feet above the Rio Grande. The landscape is made up of several long fingers of land that drop off on all sides in very sheer cliffs. It was strange, and unnerving to see that there weren't really any fences or anything surrounding these cliffs. Needless to say, the kids stayed in the car a LOT! It was weird to see that even the homes there backed onto these cliffs, without any fences. I don't know how people raise children here, but I suppose it's possible! Civilization is about an hour and 15 minutes away, so it's pretty remote. There was 1 grocery store in town, a library, a museum on the atomic bomb (since that is where it was invented), a mcDonalds, and.... well, that's about it. They do have a couple of restaurants, but we were surprised to see that they all close at 8pm except for a chinese restaurant that closed at 9... they didn't let us dine in, but allowed us to get takeout at 8:30. We rented a Prius, which was interesting! It took us quite awhile just to figure out how to turn the car on! We ended up liking the car quite a bit though, and saved a lot in gas (since the airport in Albequerque is 2 hours away).
We had a fun trip, but it was great to be home and see some green again!!!

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