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Posted

I present to you the longest thread I have ever posted. You dont have to read it, it wont make me sad if you dont.

Most people, for spring break, go to the beach and get drunk. I am an Electrical Engineering student, so I spend my free time a bit differently.

As kind of a segway from the ever popular Geek Photos thread, I present to you my trip to New Mexico. First off, who cares about NM, its boring, smells bad (I’m talking to you Roswell residents), wishes it was as big as Texas, and no one seems to actually enjoy living there.

However they do have one thing that my great state (Texas) does not. The Black Hole. On the northern edge of Los Alamos, the atomic bomb city is a military surplus store that has been slowly collecting junk for the past 55 years. Not just any junk though, I'm talking surplus from the national labs right next door.

I discovered the place through a Make Blog link, and a subsequent mention in a Clive Cussler book. It was only a passing thought but my brother really wanted to go, so spring break, we packed our things, and went to New Mexico. What follows is a picture diary of the trip. I'll try to skip out on the boring things, like driving through New Mexico, and get to the images of the Hole.

At any time, you can just go to my Flickr account and see them all, but i warn you, some of the images are boring and poorly taken, that’s my brother's fault.

We left at around 12:20 on Thursday morning in order to get to the national park in time to relax. This is Dad’s truck all loaded for the trip.

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Some where in the middle of west Texas is a town called Ozona, and its only redeeming quality is a car museum, there they had this:

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One of my brothers was asleep in the back for the first part of the drive, and when he woke up he found me reacting everyone’s favorite movie on the laptop that telling us where to go. (I now love GPS even more)

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Best Semi truck, ever.

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New Mexico rice is not very tasty.

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Salt and pepper pilfered from the worst Denny’s in the country (that’s in Carlsbad for those who want to avoid it) for our steaks later that night.

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Obligatory Roswell picture; myself (the one who isn’t photogenic) and my bro.

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A very hi-tech trip. We had the two laptops, one connected to a GPS, two game boys, 3 cell phones, a 20GB mp3 player, an FM tuner, a Valentine One radar detector, all powered off of a 750 Watt inverter. (We only blew the fuse once)

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This is New Mexico, don’t go there for the scenery unless you go to the northern part.

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The last member of our intrepid trio.

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The park we stayed at had some of the Pueblo ruins, so we had to go see them.

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Dinner

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The next morning. I was boiling water for coffee in the frying pan. That stove and lantern are older than me.

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FINALY, our destination.

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Sorry for the bad ones, my brother failed to realize that there was a macro setting on the camera.

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This thing is technically a WMD, since it can make 5 literes of anthrax at a time.

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Control system for a laser cooling apparatus, the owner of the place paid 10 bucks for it.

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Oddly, I didn’t get any pictures of what I actually bought, so I’ll try to get some later. I really had to stop myself from buying too much, but I did manage to walk out with two mulitmeters from the 70s, complete with nixie tube displays.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the pictures at my flickr account:

http://flickr.com/photos/bbasile/sets/72057594088146637/

if you care that is.

Cliffs:

1. went to new mexico

2. it is very borring there

3. Roswell is overrated

4. Stoped at the black hole and got somecool stuff

5. ...

6. Profit

Posted

That looked like some interesting stuff you got to see when you got there.

Sounds like the actual trip wasn't that great.

Interesting trip.

Posted

The trip wasnt that bad for being 16 hours and through the desert, but it could of been worse. I was Saint Patties day on friday, so we had car bombs and lots of guinness, definatly made the rest better.

As for those computers, i believe that standard protocal for imformation storage mediums if to run a high level erase simmilar to autoclave and a magnetic erase.

Posted

That looks like fun. 16 hours driving? You can't do that in the UK without ending up in the sea :-(

Posted

My brother saw this thread and reminded me to say that there are absolutly no trees in New Mexico. If you check the Flickr page there are some shots out the window from the drive.

  • 2 weeks later...

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