The morning started at 5:00, when we drove to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. There was a lot of stop and slow traffic for the last coupla miles, and a near miss at the parking lot we were directed to, but somehow we ended up at the balloon fiesta JUST IN TIME for the Dawn Patrol, which is a small series of balloons they send up in the darkness.
I took very, very few photos of Dawn Patrol. This was due, in part, to the fact that I'm really big on EXPERIENCING a thing and not taking anything away from it to watch it on a screen. And also, in part, to it being too damn cold for me to take off my gloves to operate my camera phone. Here's, like, my one picture of balloons before dawn.
But my friends, Karen and Bits, wanted to take lots of pictures, so we were walking out on the field to find more balloons and better views, and eventually dawn well and truly happened. And we looked around -- really looked around where we had walked in the darkness -- and discovered we'd walked nearly all the way to the other end of the balloon field. (Which is something like 54 football fields in size.) Balloons were starting to inflate around us. We asked a nearby dude with a big camera (who looked like he knew what he was doing -- when it comes to zoom lenses, apparently size DOES matter) where we should stand for the upcoming mass ascension, and he suggested that we could stay pretty much where we were. Because being there on the field, we would be SURROUNDED by balloons. I did not necessarily believe this. I probably should have.
Balloons are everywhere. There were set spaces on the field for each balloon crew -- they come in a truck, unload the balloon, stretch it out, fill it up, light it up, and take off. Then the truck leaves (doubling as the chase vehicle). We found an open space -- either a crew didn't show, or it was a balloon that already left in dawn patrol -- and we stood there looking at the balloons around us. Until some dude starts inflating on my left and another is inflating on my right and I have to run forward to not get squashed because THERE ARE SO MANY BALLOONS THEY CANNOT INFLATE WITHOUT PRESSING AGAINST EACH OTHER. Holy fuck, that's a lot of balloons.
Seriously. Don't get distracted by all the balloons in the air in that picture -- look at the field of balloons on the ground, pressing against each other, just waiting to go.
Here's us, grinning like idiots, with a bunch of balloons behind us.
(I just like this picture.)
Also, they had lots of balloons shaped like ... things that aren't balloons. I got a really good picture of the Yoda balloon. Also, I got pictures of the Boba Fett guarding the Darth Vader and Yoda balloon inflation -- with a lot of lens flare, which somehow seems appropriate.
We had paid a lot of money for access to the snooty area at Balloon Fiesta, which gave us the good parking, a breakfast buffet, and non-porta-john-toilets. (I had sorta wanted this from the start, but didn't know if Karen and Bits would be interested in upgrading to the pricey tickets. Said Karen, "You had me at bathrooms.") So, after we watched all the ascending, we went back to the snooty area, had our breakfast, used our toilets, got our free lapel pins, and ... realized we had too much to do the rest of the day, so headed out of there.
Back to the hotel to change, then off to Kasha-Katuwe National Monument. It was crowded. It was so crowded, cars were being held at the entrance because the parking lot was full. We waited our turn, ponied up our five bucks, and-- OK, while we were waiting our turn, the ranger gave us a little booklet about the Monument, and that's when Karen read about the two hikes or the "spectacular overlook" you could drive up to. I'm all for seeing nature without the hike, so we drove up to the overlook and we were ALONE up there. (Does nobody else read the little booklet? Karen's the sort who always reads the booklet, so she always finds the stuff everybody misses.)
And then we got in the car and drove PAST Santa Fe (that's for tomorrow) to Los Alamos.
It was pretty cool to have someone TAKE the obligatory photo for us, so we weren't trying to somehow get our three faces and that giant sign in there for the selfie, but Random Sweaty Man Going For A Run might have gone a little too distant on this shot.
We stopped at the Starbucks and I was totally annoyed that they only sold a New Mexico Starbucks mug, because I really wanted a Los Alamos Starbucks mug. Like maybe with a little mushroom cloud or something?
We... couldn't find the Los Alamos History Museum. Google Maps helpfully took us down a dead end, and we eventually parked at the Los Alamos Senior Center and wandered around a bunch of buildings which looked vaguely like the image Google was showing us until we found it. (The dead end was actually the start of a path you should walk down -- it was a coupla buildings away and didn't front on the road.) Felt like idiots. Way too many advanced degrees among the three of us to not be able to find a damn museum.
I really dug the museum. A bit of stuff about it before the Manhattan Project days, but, of course, the whole BUILDING AND TESTING A NUCLEAR BOMB bit was front and center. (And the post-war Cold War Era stuff, too.) Had a very ... ambivalent message. They tried to be thought provoking about nuclear bombs and asked visitors to write down their answer to the question of whether scientists should be responsible for making weapons that kill. They posted a few answers on the wall in the form of a silent dialogue. Very interesting.
(Also had cool artifacts from the era, including a plastic mug which said "Los Alamos" and had a mushroom cloud on it and I was all, "See? This is what Starbucks needed.")
On the way back, we stopped at a rock what looked like E.T. from one angle, but it's actually called Camel Rock. In a surprising burst of respect, I decided to take the selfie from an angle which confirms its camelishness.
Driving back, we talked about family history and preserving it and ancestry and connections to the past and (for some damn reason) the National Anthem protests. Got a little heated there on that last one, but, hey, we've been friends for almost 30 years -- not gonna let anything like that get in our way.
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