VLA Day

Today started off with a remarkable case of altitude sickness. If you've never experienced this, it's like a hangover, except with a much more acute feeling of malaise. Holy cow. Making a conscious effort to breathe as deeply as possible with every breath helps alleviate some of the symptoms. If you can beat the headache, the rest of the day will be a lot easier to manage.
Tonight will be our last night in Santa Fe, thankfully Durango is at about half the altitude.
After walking the pups at Frank Ortiz dog park, we did a little caching. The first one Torrey tracked down was a virtual cache at the east side of the dog park. It was at a plaque commemorating that spot as the location of an interment camp for citizens of Japanese descent during WW II. About 4,550 citizens were held there.
The second cache was a "Peace Cache", on some public land not far from the dog park. It was a really cool cache- literally as big as a 5-gallon bucket. Torrey left a travelbug we picked up from a cache in Fayetteville, NY...the bug wants to goto Alaska, and we helped it along a ways, and this seemed like an awesome cache to leave it at. We also picked up a Geocoin and logged it... We'll drop it somewhere along our travels. Then, off to the VLA!
We left Santa Fe, and dropped into the big valley to the south via I-25. As we dropped in altitude, both Torrey and I could breathe much easier, and, with the help of a couple Tylenol, our headaches soon were gone. Amazing scenery along the way. We took a detour on 60 east a ways and checked out Abo Pueblo, ruins of a Salinas outpost, dating back to the mid 1600's. Nifty! We chatted with the ranger for a couple minutes, then headed on our way. 60 west from I-25 runs over the Magdalene fault...there was a virtual cache at the side of the road there, and we learned some facts about something we didn't even know existed. Wow! Muriel saw a road runner near the side of the road on the way, and we saw numerous ravens, scrub jays, and piñon jays.
The VLA; Big. I wasn't sure what I was expecting to see out there, but it is pretty cool. Some of the exhibits are a little dated, but then the facility was dedicated in 1980. Recent improvements include replacement of the analog wire-wound stainless waveguides with 128 GPS fiber optics. They are doing some big science out there, we actually observed the dishes move: when we arrived, they were all "looking" straight up; when we were driving out of the facility, they were at about "2-o'clock", and they were almost at 90 degrees by the time we were pulling onto route 60.