Can you show me the way to Sante Fe?

Alright, alright.  I know that is not how that phrase goes.  But I'm in Santa Fe, so work with me.  This is a very cool little town.  And if you didn't know, it's actually the state capital of New Mexico.  Usually when you travel to a place for business, you spend more time in the airport, a cab or rental car, or a conference room than you do getting to enjoy what the city has to offer.  Luckily for me, I've had a little time to enjoy the local culture.  The city is over 400 years old so it has some history to it.

My co-workers have traveled out here many times before so they know some of the historical places to visit and the must-try restaurants.  This is the market that we got to visit the other day.  Local Native American artists set up to sell their hand-crafted jewelry, pottery, and other crafts.  One of my co-workers compared Santa Fe to Charleston, South Carolina.  That seems like an odd comparison, but I think it's very fitting.  As I mentioned earlier, you can feel the history when you walk around.  With the market, fabulous church buildings, and other historical sites, there's a sense of a time gone by that you get in Charleston.

So you may be wondering what I'm doing in Santa Fe.  We are traveling out here to meet with our scientists in our Los Alamos office.  Yeah, scientists, how cool is that?

If you don't know about Los Alamos, it's a pretty interesting place.  It's a city on a plateau almost in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico.  It's about 45 minutes outside of Santa Fe.  It's also the home to the United States work on developing the atomic and nuclear bomb.  In fact, there is still a nuclear facility where testing and research is still conducted.  We drove by it.  It basically looks like a normal production plant.  No large towers or huge billowing smoke, but very cool none the less.

One cool thing we got to do was tour the Bradbury Science Musuem (named for a former director of the testing facility).  It was interesting to read the history around the development of this weaponry and how it was used and implemented.  This is a picture of a replica of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during WWII.  They also had a replica of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki; it was a little smaller and less impressive.  This is not to celebrate the lives that were lost in the dropping of those bombs or in the ware in general.  However, it is interesting to learn about the history behind that and how that helped us defeat the empire of Japan which had attacked us at Pearl Harbor.

So that was my visit to Santa Fe, which technically isn't over because I fly home today.  The best I can remember, I've now visited 21 states.  Maybe not that impressive, but I'm almost half-way there.