Halfway done

The end of week 4 marks the halfway point of my summer in Los Alamos. Today completed a very fun weekend. I suppose I forgot to mention that we also had a bonfire last night over at Ted's. Not that it matters, it was just more fun. And then the night sky here is amazing. You can see so many more stars, and the stars that I'm used to seeing are just that much brighter.

Today was just a great way to top off the weekend. We went down to a winery early in the afternoon. The drive was pretty spectacular. We drove through the huge caldera here, although we didn't see any elk. Usually at this time, people say you can see up to a thousand elk if you're lucky. Oh well. Then there were some great mountains and canyons on the way. We also passed by some places that have some great hot springs. That will be another day's trip perhaps. The winery was very nice. They let us try tastes of basically all of the wines they had. They had a range from dry to very sweet in both red and white wines, which was very nice to compare all of them. The huge favorite of our group was their best selling wine, which they called a Jemez Red, Jemez for the area that winery is located. I must say that wine was incredible. The smell was just amazing and the taste was perfect. On the way back we stopped along the Jemez River, although the rivers around here are usually not very big rivers due the dryness. It had carved a little cave structure that people were wading in and enjoying some relaxing.

So after getting back, pretty much right away I took off with some others to go see Transformers. Good action, definitely an entertaining movie, I recommend seeing it at some point. Then went for a run to test out my endurance at this altitude. Wasn't bad, should be interesting to see what it's like coming back to sea level.

Well back to the work week soon... going down to Sandia for a field trip on Friday, everyone is looking forward to that. I hear from some program alumni that the Aging Aircraft facility should be a lot of fun. Supposedly we get to climb around in a retired 747. I've heard stories about people cramming themselves into the overhead bins, and also that we should try to find the path from the landing gear up to the main cabin. I'll see if I have time tomorrow to upload pics from this weekend, but don't count on it.