growing urban wildflowers~: mountains and desert: geeking out (6)

We don't usually start a day of driving and sightseeing with a glass of wine, but we were in New Mexico wine country, and the timing only worked to visit a winery 10 miles away from where we had stayed the previous night. (We followed our post-breakfast glass of wine with quite a bit of water!) This is the Tularosa winery, just north of Alamogordo. They also grow pistachios and pecans.

We had a choice of two petroglyph sites to visit, one just off our drive for the day, one in Albuquerque. Since we thought we'd have more time on our travel day than in the city, we stopped, and we're glad we did. What a neat area! This is Three Rivers Petroglyph Recreational Site, about 3 miles off highway 54.

Then it was on to the Very Large Array! For quite a bit of geekery...

Who wouldn't want radio telescope bathroom tiles?!

We arrived at the visitor center just before the gift shop was to close, so we had to change our "on our way out" policy and pick up our swag first. Since the VLA is free to visit, and the gift shop lady so helpful (free homeschool packet!), we were happy to support them with our T-shirt, sticker, and mug purchases.

The self-guided tour is excellent, starting with a movie and indoor exhibits, you then move outside to follow their walking tour around the area. Since this is a working site, with people in all the surrounding buildings, even though it's literally in the middle of nowhere and there was no one with us, we didn't feel too isolated.

Storms began to surround us as we explored, so we finished briskly (desert storms are quick and full of lightening!) and made our way the 45 minutes back to Socorro.

After dinner, we had a astronomy talk with some students from the astronomy club at New Mexico Tech... just for us! We were supposed to do some telescope observing, but the clouds had firmly stuck around by evening, so we did some virtual observing on the internet, and had nice discussions with these smart kids.