Very Large Array

About a 30 minute drive east of Pie Town is the Very Large Array. The VLA consists of a bunch of gigantic radio telescopes mounted on rails that can be moved around. When they're in their largest configuration, they cover an area the size of Washington DC.

On the official tour, the role the VLA plays in looking for aliens is downplayed. Melody thought that was suspicious.

Pie Town (Part 2)

More pie from Pie Town, this time from the Pie-O-Neer.

Just down the street from the Daily Pie Cafe, the Pie-O-Neer offered warm pies right off the cooling rack (pictured above is a slice of oatmeal-pecan). The crust on the Pie-O-Neer pies was fresh and flaky. We had a pleasant conversation with the crust maker herself as we ate our pie.

Pie town (Part 1)

After a day spent visiting the Lightning Field outside of Quemado, we stopped in Pie Town.

There were no more than half a dozen buildings in Pie Town, but two of them were pie shops. We stopped at the Daily Pie Cafe first.

The pie selection.

A serious banana cream.

Triple berry.

The Daily Pie Cafe was pretty solid. The banana cream was thick and creamy, the triple berry was tart and not too sweet. I only got a little taste of the New Mexico specialty, an apple pie with green chiles and pine nuts (not pictured), but it seemed good. We were warned to avoid the coffee by a couple of women who visited the Lightning Field with us, so we didn't get a full Twin Peaks-style pie and coffee experience.

40 Million-Year-Old Cave Now a Plush Hotel

Kokopelli's cave in Farmington, NM.

Remote Controlled F-102

While visiting the White Sands Missile Range Museum, I learned that technicians flew a modified, remote-controlled version of the F-102 supersonic fighter from a specially equippped van.



I found the picture online here.

And here's the control panel that was used to fly it.

Nuclear Waste

We spotted several flatbed trucks during our trip carrying big gray containers. When we went to the Museum of Atomic History in Albuquerque we learned that they are for the transport of nuclear waste (if you look closely you can see the radiation symbol on the lower part of the containers). We thought that these might be going from Los Alamos to Yucca Mountain.

Space Age Picnic

At White Sands National Monument, there is a space age picnic area composed of corrigated aluminum covered picnic tables. Some have grills. Under one of these Melody and I sheltered from the wind and sun and ate dehydrated space ice cream and drank coke from a bottle.

Space Cola

At the Alamagordo Museum of Space History.

These containers were part of the so-called Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation, which, according to Wikipedia was "an experiment where both Coca-Cola and Pepsi tried to make their drinks available to astronauts. Both fizzed excessively in microgravity."

The cola dispensers were part of the cargo of a space shuttle mission in 1985. (Wikipedia)

Jake One & Mr. Supreme

A slide from Zed's talk at the UNM pop culture conference last weekend.

UNM

University of New Mexico, in and around the student center. The mascot of UNM is the lobo. My overall impression of the campus is that it is very much like my parents' alma mater, Fresno State, but with an adobe theme. And the air is clear enough that you can see the nearby mountains.