New Mexico

   Today's agenda included a visit to the huge radio telescope site south of Albuquerque called the VLA; short for Very Large Array. To get there we drove backroads south from Gallup. As we got further from town the roads weren't paved and eventually became pretty muddy with an overnight rain. When we got near the community of Pietown, the mud got too deep for our car. We backed out and found our way to the paved roads before the rains came again. We re-learned our lesson to stay on the main roads, and things got a lot easier.

   The VLA consists of 27 huge dish antennae that are all linked together electronically and act like one giant antenna, 23 miles across. The individual dishes are huge in themselves, each bigger than a baseball diamond and they're moveable depending on what the astronomers are looking at. The facility is located off Rt 60, 50 miles west of Socorro at an altitude of 7,000 ft.

   In the afternoon we took I-25 back to Albuquerque and turned east again on I-40. It was a wet afternoon, more rainfall in one day than the area has seen in months; it definitely helped out with all the mud we picked up on the car. We stopped for the night in the town of Moriarty, NM and will continue on toward home in the morning. Only 1,894 miles to go.