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Los Alamos New Mexico

Los Alamos New Mexico

  • Author: admin
  • Date Posted: Jun 30, 2012
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We pulled into Los Alamos in the afternoon.  Our goal of this trip was to visit sites along the Continental Divide, and one place we had to see was the former Manhattan Project location of Los Alamos.  In the 1940’s (and still today), this was a hotbed of scientific discovery.

We visited the Los Alamos nuclear museum, which I think now is called the Bradbury Science Museum.  They have replicas of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on the Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki sites.  Also, they have all sorts of nuclear artifacts.  We have visited all the major Manhattan Project locations, like Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos and so on.  The only place that is off limits is the Trinity site, which is only open 2 days out of the year.

After going on the Los Alamos Laboratory tour, we made the mistake of staying at the local Motel 6.  We have had terrible luck with that franchise.  The only reasonable Motel 6 in the history of Motel 6’s, is the one in Boise.  Other than that, they are all terrible.  And the one in Los Alamos was worse than anything we had ever encountered.

It all started ok.  We pull up, get a room, and enter it.  Then we find it not very clean, both in the bedroom and bathroom.  We ordered pizza delivery, and ate our food.  Then we went to bed, because we had driven all night and day from Los Angeles to get here.

In the night I awoke to crinkling of a bag on the floor.  I snatch it up, and capture the creature in the bag.  It was a massive cockroach.  We immediately took it to the lobby and asked for  our money back.  They didn’t exterminate the bug; they just threw it away, and I’m 100% sure it just climbed out of the trash and reentered the lobby.  We gathered our things and went into the parking lot.  We didn’t want to bring any stowaways into my veggie car, so we took the time to shake out our clothes one-by-one from our luggage in the parking lot.  While this was happening in the middle of the night, a cop showed up.  Apparently, the owners of that shithole called the cops on us for spending a few minutes making sure we didn’t bring any bedbugs or cockroaches into our car.  We explained it to the cop, he rolled his eyes, and entered the lobby.  He returned after chastising the owners.  He took our side on the issue.

Not a good endorsement of Los Alamos at the end, but the Nuclear sites were cool.  Now we got an early start to head north into Colorado.

 

 

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