CnC: Pie and the Sky - a little Space

A not-so-good start to the day saw us all packed up and away at 8am to meetup with Jeff at a servo out of town. The not-so-good bit was Charleen inadvertently drop-kicked the Canon G12 and it landed flat on its lens on the concrete. Busted!

Damn!

Jack offered us his, recently purchased in Australia, but he hadn't brought the charger. So, Linda offered hers. Nice camera and we are hoping it charges from USB.

Breakfast and camera swaps over, we headed out on a tour led by Jeff to take us an interesting way to the VLA and on to The Owl Cafe.

Started off taking a small piece of the old Route 66 road. Very picturesque and much nicer to ride than the Interstate, or SuperSlab as we call it.

Interstate 40 and old Route 66

Much better riding on 66

But the slab does make for quick time from A to B so it was back on and travel 50 or so miles to where we turned south. On to a much quieter road away from the traffic. Hwy 117 for those using the numbers, took us towards the VLA - eventually. Mean time, what spectacular scenery!!
High sandstone cliffs to our left towered over us as we rode and on the right a curious mass of black rocks showed the track of an ancient lava flow.

Cliffs and lava to ride between

This bit of sandstone escaped

Dwarfed by the cliffs. If you look closely, you can see a gigantic Arch between the two outcrops.

Some of the local scenery is not to be played with. This is known locally as Jumping Cactus because it apparently jumps out to get you as you walk by. Local Legend.

The road then opened out to wide flat expanse which reminded us very much of riding in the Aussie Outback, except for the differing wildlife. We caught occasional glimpses of prairie dogs nervously running about and scampering into their underground holes. A bit like rabbits. Nervously, because there were plenty of eagles soaring above waiting the right moment to pounce. Tough life.

We were headed for a place called Pie Town and our GPSs kept trying to use dirt roads. That might have been OK for Jack and Jeff on their dual-purpose bikes, but not for this little black Feejer. We turned on to one that had a short piece of bitumen and looked promising, but quickly turned bad. Interestingly, Jeff's GPS's advice was to proceed 1.4 miles down this bad dirt road and make a U-turn. We U-turned where we were. Thanks very much.
Fuel at Quemado then a short ride to Pie Town. As the name suggests, this is THE place to get some pie and almost nobody drives past, (although it is quite a lonely road and almost nobody drives past anyway).
Great pie and iced tea on a hot day. Most of us had New Mexican apple and green chilli pie - take a bite and it bites you back. Actually very yummy.

This photo is for Michael and the team at Backstreet Espresso. These pies would go down well with Backstreet coffee.

Five happy pie-fed faces

Then it was another fifty miles or so to the main purpose of riding these lonely New Mexican roads, the VLA or Very Large Array.
This is an arrangement of radio telescopes that does some great astronomical science, but for us may be better known as a backdrop for the film Contact, written by Carl Sagan and starring Jodie Foster.

27 dishes, albeit each a lot smaller than Australia's beloved Parkes Dish, are aligned on three rows up to 13 miles long. This gives the effect of one dish with a radius of 13 miles. Excellent radio-source gathering power and a lot of what we now know of our Universe was determined using this array.

Three rows of dishes

They are moved on a double set of railway lines

What a dish!!

The array is configurable by running the dishes along rail tracks then positioning them on great concrete blocks. There are five configurations, depending on how far out into space they want to look, a mind-blowingly huge version of turning the lens on a camera. Currently, they are upgrading to optical fibre transmission of the gathered data, which runs into the millions of gigabytes per second range. The blurb talks of information, the equivalent amount of 400 volumes of War and Peace per second. Sheesh.

Jack and Linda on the Tiger and Jeff on his BMW GS, crossing the rail lines of the VLA

Next it was further east to Socorro where we briefly joined I25 and went a little south to San Antonio, NM where we were to turn off, but first a stop in at The Owl Cafe, Jack and Linda's favourite bar and grill and a very famous place.
This is very close to the site of the first nuclear bomb test site during World War 2 and the people who worked there would occasionally take time out to relax at the Owl Cafe, closest to their workplace several miles out in the desert. I sat in a chair that maybe was sat in by the brilliant engineers who worked on the Manhattan Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test), thus greatly reducing the average IQ of visitors to this establishment.
We all had green chilli cheese burgers. (Are you starting to see a theme in New Mexican food?) which definitely had that "bite you back" effect, but were yummy.

It was here we sadly parted company with our New Mexican hosts. They to return home, north to Albuquerque and us to head east on to Adventures Unknown.
We started out with the road pretty much to ourselves with 150 miles to Roswell NM, with a howling side wind coming off the White Sands desert, arriving there quite late but never too late to locate a Super8 for our digs for the night.