Noises emanating from under the hood of our Ford F-250 can be hard to identify, particularly when they are intermittent. We jumped into the truck this morning to take it to the local Ford dealership so they could attempt to discern the origin of the mystery noise from Charlotte’s engine compartment. Of course, the engine would make no funny sounds while we were at the dealership service facility. Realizing that even the most experienced and savvy mechanic could not determine the sources of sounds that cannot be heard, we decided to take the truck for a spin to see if some stop and start or some challenging roads could cause the resurrection of the mystery noise.
We started by going to a restaurant called Harry’s Roadhouse where they served us a good breakfast. We had all we wanted and got out for about $25 plus tip. We then didn’t really have a specific destination so we got lost in old Santa Fe for a bit before finding our way to a National Park Service visitor information center. The nice folks inside stocked us up with all the literature about national park and forest service attractions nearby but they could not tell us anything about a local site called Tent Rocks (also called Kasha-Katuwe which means something in a language) because it was under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. We decided a national park or monument would be a good alternative to Tent Rocks and chose instead to go to Bandelier National Monument about 35 miles from Santa Fe.
Bandelier is a big facility but all the neat stuff is in a canyon where you can drive right up to the visitor center at the end of the park road. A short hike behind the visitor center will take you by a big kiva and to the remains of a giant circular long house built by a civilization that has left artifacts indicating 11,000 years of presence in this gorgeous canyon. In the south-facing cliffs of the canyon walls there are numerous cave dwellings, some with multiple rooms. The cave houses started as little holes in the tuff formation but lots of gouging and digging by the residents enlarged the holes dramatically. A bit more of a hike from the long house will get interested, fit folks up to some ladders so the curious can go into a few of the cave dwellings. Archaeologists postulate that the long house, kiva and cliff dwellings were inhabited by around 500 people for 4,000 years. The inhabitants apparently had a pretty good deal here with sturdy shelter, agriculture and year-round water. One of the docents indicated that the cliff dwellings may have been the winter lodgings because the longhouse and kiva go into shade at about 2:30 and it gets cold in the canyon bottom at 7000′ in northern New Mexico.
After our hike to the long house and back, we took off to go see the town of Los Alamos where the research for the Manhattan Project (the A-bomb) was performed by many awkward scientists and social misfits who were also extremely bright. Los Alamos had and still has the highest concentration of PhDs per capita. Los Alamos was not what we expected.
First we had to go through a guard station on the highway where the nice man told us how to get to the town of Los Alamos but warned us not to make any right turns for the first 2.5 miles of road because we would be traveling through Los Alamos National Laboratory property. We were not to take any pictures of anything and he suggested we put our camera away (possibly in order to help us avoid anal probes,waterboarding or enhanced interrogation by zealous security personnel tasked with keeping idiots and tourists from taking pictures of ugly government buildings).
We finally got to the town itself and the homes there are very nice. The medium family income here is $90,000 and their massive and shiny municipal buildings may be the result. There are some old structures in town that look like they were barracks for the thousands who worked here during the last years of WWII. In town, there is also an ample scattering of buildings that look like they used to belong to the feds – ugly, unimaginative but expensive. Many have been re-purposed as businesses but once on the other side of the fence everything looks very government-ish. The whole place was a strictly-controlled government town in the 1940s with nothing but civil servants and their families living here. Now there is a civilian population but I bet almost all their dads and moms work in the hideous buildings beyond the security goons or at Starbucks.
We headed back down the steep road from Los Alamos back to Santa Fe, stopping at a crummy, expensive liquor store at Jack’s casino in Pojoaque. Beer prices at Jack’s are okay but the liquor prices were horrifying. We continued to Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe to replenish our stores that were severely depleted during our last stay in Tucumcari. Wouldn’t you know it – the truck started making the mystery sound again, right after the Ford dealership closed.
There’s some pix of Bandelier and Los Alamos to be seen if you click here