Just outside of Santa Fe is Los Alamos, one of the sites which was home to the secret war-time project to develop the atomic bomb. We planned to rendezvous with some friends at the visitor center. We toured the little township. Hard to believe this was once a military base and no one knew what they were doing here. There is still research being conducted in the township, and there is one road where your vehicle is subject to search. Fortunately a local told us about a a back road which bypasses the checkpoint. This is the road we took.
In the afternoon the group headed to Bandelier National Monument for camping opportunities. The site was very busy and everything was full, not unusual for a weekend. The ranger suggested a forest area outside the National Monument, in the Valles Caldera National Preserve. We camped there for two nights.
One of our friends was having issues with their truck, so we got to some time poking around the truck seeing if we could see anything. We couldn’t. A few days later we heard they had made it back safely to California. While these trucks might complain, they do keep moving.
We also had to fix our truck, the next day we headed to Colorado.
