I, Dennis, will be posting again tonight, and this time there will be cake pictures!

So, I'll start by posting about yesterday, the 17th. We only traveled to Bandelier NM, but once we got there, we hiked on their trails and saw the caves once occupied by the native Americans. They did not carve out new caves; instead, they used the abundant natural caves and smoothed them out. The caves were formed by volcanic activity long before any humans got there, and the lava seemed to form "bubbles" in the rock. As the river (well, more of a stream, really) wore away the rock into steep cliffs, it exposed some of the bubbles and opened them up for human use.

As you can see from he picture above, they had some of the caves open for you to climb into. (Sorry for my scrunched up face! The sun was in my eyes, and I couldn't pull back into the shade, or else you wouldn't be able to see me.) There were several caves that we could go into, including one that was maybe ten feet across, tall enough for me to stand in, and apparently used in religious ceremonies. Of course, caves being as they are, it was kinda hard to get a good picture of it.

The above video helps to show some sense of scale, if you can keep up with my wild camera swings. :) The park had a mile long loop trail running alongside the cliff and the caves. There was another mile long trail to the "Alcove House" where there was a large alcove in the cliff that the natives built houses inside of. The houses are long gone, and even the circle structure is a reconstruction. Grandpa decided not to hike the extra mile and said he would wait at a bench where the trail to the Alcove House split from the main loop. I joked that if it got too hot (since there wasn't too much shade) that he could go back and sit inside the big cave.

The alcove was a bit too large to fit in one picture, or even three stitched together like the one above. You also couldn't get a good picture of it from the ground, although you could get a good picture of what you had to climb to get to the alcove in the first place.

When I came back from the Alcove House, Grandpa wasn't sitting on the bench I had left him on. I first thought that he took my suggestion to go back to the cave seriously, then I noticed there was plenty of shade over that bench. My fears were compounded when I discovered that he wasn't in the cave either. I wondered if he had decided to hike to the Alcove House alone. I hadn't seen him on the way back, but there was at least one other trail from the main loop to the Alcove House. Now, normally when you get lost or separated, you should stay in one place, since it's a lot easier to find someone who's standing still as compared to someone who's hiking into the place you just looked. However, looking at the trail map, I saw that there were three potential ways to get back to the motorhome: the main loop that I was on, a trail that lead at least five miles down the canyon, and from there I had no idea where the trail went, or a one-and-a-half mile trip up the cliff sides (using the trail and stairs, of course) to the RV campground. Based on the fact that he didn't even want to hike one measly extra mile on mostly flat trails to the Alcove House, I decided that Grandpa had followed the main loop trail back to the visitor's center. And if I was wrong, well, that where he had parked the motorhome, so he had to come back there eventually!

It turns out he had decided that I had spent too much time on the trail and had gone back to the visitor's center to organize a search party. The reason, he said, was that he had been told by the park staff that it took about two hours to hike both the main loop and the trail to the Alcove House. I looked at my watch... and it hadn't been more than two-and-a-half hours since we had parked the GMC. *shrug* All's well that ends well, right?

So, after spending the night at Bandelier, we went to Los Alamos this morning. It turns out that the route we took actually took us through the secure part of the town where the laboratories are, so Grandpa had to show photo ID just to get into town! Once we came out through the gates on the other side of the labs, we found the museum, and found that it open at 10:00. It was 9:20. Oh well, we thought, we'll just go to the museum about the history of Los Alamos. So we found a parking lot that we could get out of and walked to the museum. It was going to be easy, since it was just a block down the street.

Or so we thought. Los Alamos was originally a boy's camp, and the main building of the camp still stood. All the signs, as far as we could tell, pointed to it being the museum, but there was nothing museum-like about the interior. We walked around inside for a minute, then decided to go outside and find help, since there was no one inside. We walked out the side opposite the one we came in, and lo and behold, there was the history museum! Not even in the building we thought it was in. We walked over to it, and the sign said that it opened at 9:30. Despite it being 9:36, it was still locked. We looked at the sign again, and noticed that it said "Tue - Fri 9:30-5:00, Sat - Mon 11:00-5:00." We had shown up to the science museum half an hour early, and the history museum an hour-and-a-half early! We decided to walk back to the science museum and find a place to sit down.

There were a few people waiting outside for it to open, including a volunteer from the Albuquerque science museum. He had noticed the GMC both in Albuquerque and here, and even more astounding, he had a GMC of his own! He and Grandpa exchanged contact information, since he didn't yet belong to the cult of GMC. That reminds me, I'd better remind Grandpa to send him the information he promised!

Once we finally got in, the museum itself was very good, probably the best one yet. It was pretty up to date, too. Did you know that most of the scientific instruments on the Mars Curiosity rover were made in Los Alamos?

That's a picture of a model of the ChemCam, an instrument that zaps a rock with a laser and then sees what colors flash out, and can use that to figure out what the rock is made of. Here's a neat fact: Curiosity is powered by a nuclear battery. That's correct, a battery powered by the same technology that kept the world a press of a button away from destruction for forty years was sent to another planet. Reading about all that impressive technology that we have managed to sent millions of miles away onto an entire other planet, and the fact we haven't all killed each other yet, never ceases to amaze me.

The rest of the day was mostly riding. I think today we went the furthest this week: two hundred miles. We're camping in Bayfield, Colorado tonight, and if we get up early enough tomorrow, we'll go catch the scenic train to Silverton.

Finally for tonight, we're sorry that we haven't been updating as recently in the past few days. Verizon doesn't seem to like these mountains too much, but the campground here has high-speed WiFi that we're taking advantage of -- or else I would've never been able to upload that video above! That's all for tonight, and let's hope that we camp somewhere with good Internet tomorrow night, too.

-Dennis