Through the eyes of friends...

Our style of full-timing is that we are "on the go" 365.  We travel all year long.  We stop for a few days, a week or two at the most, depending on what there is to see and do.  We don't "winter" or "summer" at any given campground anywhere.  That said, we haven't set down roots of any kind (yet), and the friends we've made, have been either the ones we had before we started this lifestyle, or ones we've made along the way.

Being nomads of sorts, we seldom get "company", so when we do, it's a real treat!  This past week, some dear friends of ours that still live in a sticks & bricks house in Denver, but have the same model RV as ours and venture out camping from time to time, joined us in Albuquerque for a few days.

We had spent some time there this past April, and Rich used to come here quite a bit for work about ten years ago, and Deb had been, but not the surrounding area so much.  We all like this area, was familiar with most of it, but still had some areas that some of us hadn't seen yet, so it would be fun to show each other our "finds".

The first day's adventure was to Socorro to show Deb the Very Large Array.  Rich used to come out this way for work quite often, so he was quite fond of the area.  In our last visit, we had found a great restaurant that we wanted to share with them as well.  When we got to the small town of Socorro, we had one hit and one miss...our restaurant, the Socorro Springs Brewing Co, the lunch didn't disappoint, it still was great, but a (great) nut & jerky place that Rich used to love going to, wasn't there any longer (and no one in town knew what happened to it), so he was greatly disappointed.

We did get to see one new thing in town though, which was fun for us, and that was the inside of the San Miguel Mission.  It was closed when we were here last time, so it was nice to see how beautiful the inside is.

Rich, knowing the area, drove us on into  Magdalena and all around it, giving me the opportunity to get some really fun pictures!  We even drove out to their old cemetery!  We tried getting to "Riley" which, per their posted sign, is now a ghost town 30 miles away, but the road pretty much just petered out, oh well, we gave it a good try! 

As we drove over to the VLA, range cows and antelope came out to greet us.  Deb had never been out there, so it was fun to show her just how big those things really are!

The following day our goal was to head to the tiny town of Cerrillos!  Deb's son-in-law had a relative who had come from there and still had someone who was living there!  It's one of the town's along the "Turquoise Trail".  We had been to Madrid, which is also along this trail and a really fun town, so would be fun to show them and stop there for lunch.

Cerrillos was a hoot!  "Tiny" it is!  It's true"claim to fame" is it's beautiful and unusual turquoise.  It's a really pretty greenish color that's mined here, and at one time it and gold & silver were heavily mined in these hills.  Now, it's pretty much just this pretty turquoise.  The other thing the town's been used for is several movies have been filmed here including Young Guns.  It also had a pretty interesting Turquoise Mining Museum that had all sorts of things!  While we were there, a group of YPO (Young Presidents Association) folks were having a scavenger hunt, and showed up.  It brought back some fun memories, as I used to handle those groups in my "old event coordinator days"!

Deb & Rich did indeed catch up with "relatives" at Mary's Bar, took lots of pictures, and then we were off to Madrid!  As usual, we had a great lunch at The Hollar while we listened to the band Cactus Slim play for us! 

As usual, we found some "goodies" we couldn't pass up, as there is always something really special in this art-filled town!

It is so much fun, seeing places you've been before, through the eyes of friends!  To soon our friends were on their way back home...and we are off on yet another unknown adventure!

 ...On the road to Washington,  Marie

If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can at my Flickr account at:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/

Looking at the skies over New Mexico

Hot Air Balloons and Albuquerque are almost synonymous, since you can't hardly think of one without thinking of the other.  After all, balloons have been flying over the skies of Albuquerque every October for over 40 years now, and the people just love it. 

How and why did it all get started?  Well, those questions, and the whole "ballooning history" is all told in the wonderful Anderson-Abruzzo International Balloon Museum in Albuquerque.  They take you back in time to the very beginning of ballooning, where the very first balloons went up (with a duck, a sheep and a rooster) in France.  Through the war years, on into the space age.  And how did Albuquerque end up with a balloon festival back in 1972?  Well, it began as a highlight of a 50th birthday celebration for KOB Radio.  The radio station manager, Dick McKee, asked Sid Cutter, owner of Cutter Aviation and the first person to own a hot air balloon in New Mexico, if KOB could use his new balloon as part of the celebration. The two began discussing ballooning, along with conversation and help from Oscar Kratz, and McKee asked what the largest gathering of hot air balloons to date had been. ”19 balloons in England”, Cutter replied. Kratz asked “Can we get 19 here?” Cutter said he would try. He got commitments from 21 pilots, but bad weather kept some of them from arriving in time for the festivities. The first fiesta ended up as a gathering of 13 balloons on April 8, 1972, sponsored by KOB. The first event was located in the parking lot of the Coronado Center Shopping Mall with 20,000 spectators and with balloonists from all over. McKee, Cutter, and Kratz are the three men who had originally started the balloon races.

The next year Albuquerque hosted the first World Hot-Air Balloon Championships in February and the fiesta became an international event.  In 1975 Albuquerque was looking at hosting the World Championships again, but the event was scheduled for October. So the fiesta was moved to correspond with the championships.  The Balloon Fiesta grew each year for decades, and today it is the largest balloon gathering in the world.  The number of registered balloons reached a peak of 1,019 in 2000, prompting the Balloon Fiesta Board to limit the number to 600 starting in 2009, citing a desire for “quality over quantity”.  Spectators can reach over 100,000 on any given day.  A number of years ago, Jack and I were just passing through, and lucked out, that it just happened to be on "the day" of the fiesta.  We stopped for gas and saw cars pulled over everywhere with people looking up...so we did too!  Wow, what a beautiful sight!  The sky was full of every kind of balloon as far as you could see!  It was spectacular!  See...it pays to look to the sky!

 Le Reveillon, Blanchard's Balloon, Graf Zepplin & Le Martial Balloons

 "The Balloon Goes to War"

 Aeronauts Before Astronauts, The Strato-Lab

 Specialty Balloons

Another sky, about a hour and half outside of Albuquerque, gives you a whole other experience.  This sky is quiet, filled with stars, and away from city lights.  It affords the "best view" for the 27 Very Large Array Telescopes run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro New Mexico.  Do you remember the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster back in 1996?  This is that place!  One very big difference tho...they are not for listening...they are for seeing.  Simply put, "regular" telescopes can see a small portion of the galaxy, VLA, using radio waves, lining up together, can see a very large portion of the galaxy.  Thus, they have been able to discover areas of the galaxy (black holes, gas & dust clouds that optical telescopes cannot see into).  Because they use radio waves, they are not limited to night vision either, they are "on" 24 hours a day.  Since it first began watching the skies back in 1976, the VLA has observed nearly 43,000 different cosmic objects. 

Each of the 27 antennas in the array weighs over 230 tons, is 82 feet across and over 90 feet high.  They are on 82 miles of railroad tracks in a "Y" shape.  Most of their staff are in the town of Socorro, a core of 50 staff members, including 24 hour security, are kept busy on-site in the desert by the VLA's diverse needs.  The views from each of the 27 active antennas in the array are sent down fiber optic cables to a supercomputer.  The supercomputer mathematically merges the 27 views, uniting the array into a single, powerful telescope.  The merged observations of the VLA have the qualities of a giant telescope with an eye 22 miles across!  Now, that's really seeing some sky!

...kicking back in New Mexico,  Marie

If you wish to view the rest of the photos from this trip, you can at my Flickr account at:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/74905158@N04/