Santa Fe, New Mexico has some wild things, like this Tibetan temple not far from the Wal-Mart and main strip! Really reminded of the Lao temples around the US. A few hours drive north of Santa Fe is Los Alamos, the once secret home of the Manhattan project. You can see the rest area bathroom dressed up to look like the base check in. There’s a few museums devoted to the nuclear bomb, and you can walk the small city complex and see where Oppenheimer lived and the other places where scientists created such a world changing weapon.
Not far from there is an impressive park, a caldera (collapsed land on top of a volcano) with a vast and huge prairie that stretched for miles. We weren’t there in the right season, but I’ve seen photos where the whole valley is lush with wildflowers. So crazy to see that huge mass of earth is sitting on geothermic energy. The park closes quite early so we didn’t get to drive through the whole thing. I’d definitely like to return one day to see the flowers and hot springs. Like I wrote in a previous post, as you come to the top of the mountain/volcano, it’s like seeing the part in a video game where you set up basecamp and farm for resources.
