Friday April 19, 2019

Road video and map – Albuquerque to Gallup, NM

Today’s journey followed historic route 66 from Albuquerque to Gallup but much of the old road is gone and, for many miles, route 66 is now Interstate 40. Even where the old highway remains it runs close to, and parallel with, the Interstate across desert and so I stayed on the Interstate.

Before leaving Albuquerque I made a couple of stops, first at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History and then at the grandly entitled American International Rattlesnake Museum. These could not be more different. The nuclear museum is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution and was chartered by Congress while the rattlesnake museum is about 25 small glass boxes of snakes in the back of a shop.

On a past trip I had been impressed by the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos which tells the story of the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear bomb in WWII.  The museum in Albuquerque covered that story, as well as the cold war and development of the hydrogen bomb, but it was much more expansive with great hands-on exhibits for children to learn the principles of nuclear physics as well as rooms devoted to applications such as medicine, power, archeology and industrial processes. They also had an outdoor display of military planes, bombs and missiles.

Although it has a certificate of excellence on TripAdvisor, I’ve already described all there was to see at the rattlesnake museum but it was only $5 and was located in Old Town Albuquerque which I had never visited. This area was the core of the city when it was founded in 1706 and much has been preserved because the modern city developed several miles away where the railroad depot was situated when it arrived in 1880. Most buildings around the plaza date from the end of the 19th century and the San Felipe de Neri Church from 1793. After spending a while exploring the area I headed to Gallup.

The first atomic bomb test was on a tower at White Sands. The nuclear museum made this reconstruction of that test bomb, nicknamed Gadget,  and, outside the museum, was the spare tower built in case the first  test failed. The test was successful and the bombing of Hiroshima followed just three weeks later.
This B52 bomber was the first one to drop a hydrogen bomb in 1956. The test bomb exploded over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Rattlesnake video clip

A corner of the plaza in Old Town with San Felipe de Neri Church on the left.
San Felipe de Neri Church is the oldest building in Albuquerque (1793)
Traditional jewelry being bartered along San Felipe St.