What was not on my bingo card was a government shutdown when i created an itinerary. Even though the websites say the parks I was going to see today were open…they were not. So what was no. 2 on the list became no. 1.
Even the Manhattan Project was park closed, Someone mentioned to me that programmers who maintain the websites were furloughed as well leaving everything in a surreal limbo. Is it? or Isn’t it?
But that was no biggee because the Los Alamos was a virtual park because the buildings it features are not open to the public. I entered the city from a back entrance which abuts the labs and so you had to provide a photo ID at a guard station which added a little faux intrigue.
Once inside and proceed to the downtown area, you immediately pass the labs which, well, looked like lab space. There was 1 gleaming glass building and 3 small parking garages. It was just another day on the ranch that I could see.
While the Manhattan Project park visitor center was closed, there was a Los Alamos visitor center in the same building and she was overloaded with spillover visitors. I was given a map along with sage phrase of, “history across the street, museum over there.” Fortunately with a population of 13,500 the place is very walkable and i opted for the history first.
Didn’t see the movie but Los Alamos seems to be the product of 2 unlikely sources. The Lieutenant General who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and was under budget and before schedule and the Theoretical Physicist. Sounds like a marriage made in heaven, huh?
Part of the story of the place is the motivated workforce behind it. The average age was 29! Where all that came together was at the Bradbury Science Museum which presented Timelines of events to help place the development of Los Alamos amid all the other things swirling around it.
Some of the sites on the town was the house where Robert Oppenheimer lived with his wife. You could not walk through it, but the neighboring house (home of physicist Edwin Mcmillan for a few years and then Hans Bethe) was open and had a slight Cold War theme to its displays.
The Bradbury museum had two sections. One was around the work of the Manhattan Project proper and the other was a section that featured the work of the labs now and which was a STEM dream on steroids.
Boys will be boys….
And speaking of which, here are the boys…
This was a life-size replica of the 10,000 Fat Man (thank you, Winston Churchill for the inspiration of the name) that was exploded above Nagasaki and help end WWII.
Anmd, of course, there was a gift shop.
The Big World 