Road Trip 2026 - Part 3 (Albuquerque to Los Alamos)

 We pulled into Lost Alamos just before dark in the middle of a heavy drizzle and fast-dropping temperatures that kind of surprised us. We were not at all prepared for the combination of rain, wind, and the lower temperature that came with an elevation of over 7,000 feet above sea level, and immediately wished we had not packed our jackets away. A bigger surprise, however, was the little guard post we encountered in the middle of the road as we approached the city.

As it turned out, I was required to hand over my photo ID to a guard who carefully scrutinized me before telling me I was OK to drive forward, but forbidden to turn right for the next mile-and-a-half. I had no idea that level of security, at least from the direction from which we entered the city, still exists in Los Alamos. Then we got an even bigger surprise when we learned that there are basically just three hotels in the immediate area - and that it was going to cost over $300 for one night in what was probably the worst hotel room of our entire 15-day trip. Supply vs. demand, and all that good stuff.

There are two first-class museums in the city that are worth a visit, and  they are close enough to each other that they can be visited in a single day without feeling that you've shortchanged either the museums or yourself. The Los Alamos History Museum includes a self-guided walking tour that gives a feel for what the town was like during the critical days of the Manhattan Project.

This is the home occupied by Robert Oppenheimer during the project. Unfortunately for us, the home is in the midst of some extensive renovation work at the moment, so we were unable to see the interior. I snapped this truncated picture of the old house so that I could hide the portion of the yard and home where most of the work seems to be happening right now. 

Edwin McMillan, the 1951 Nobel laureate in chemistry lived in this house across the way from Oppenheimer from 1942 to 1945 while working on the project. (It is now called the Hans Bethe House after the name of the man who purchased it after the war.) Luckily, as the photos below will indicate, this one is open to the public:

As you can see from the first two photos, the house still very much has a 1950s look to it. The home's bedrooms house museum exhibits including this one highlighting the work of Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish-born mathematician whose work was instrumental on the project (especially the math that made Fat Man's explosive lens possible. I love the fact that his tiny slide rule is here, but just seeing a slide rule again brought back some rather painful memories of my struggles to use a considerably larger one back in high school...don't know how he could even read the scales on one this small.

The Bradbury Science Museum is run by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is free of charge. It houses numerous interactive exhibits spread over its three galleries, and it covers the Manhattan Project from its beginnings during World War II through the present day. Today, the research focuses on supercomputers, biotechnology, and climate science. There's a lot to take in at this museum, but most people seemed to be most fascinated by the full-scale replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy.

Fat Man

Little Boy

We also enjoyed a look at the Fuller Lodge which is right across from the History Museum, This lodge was built in 1928 and was home to Los Alamos Ranch School (an exclusive boy's school) right up until it was taken over by the Army in 1943 while the Project work was being done. It then housed lots of support staff and became a social center for the scientists and their families. It is now a National Historic Landmark that museum visitors can wander around in a bit on their own.

While we were there, the lodge was temporarily housing a bunch of senior citizens from next door whose own building was undergoing some extensive air conditioning and heating work. The seniors seemed to really love their new digs. 

Back Side of Fuller Lodge

We left Los Alamos in mid-afternoon and headed to Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, along the old Oregon Trail, to see what would turn up there. (Part 4 to follow)

The Patient (2022) by Tim Sullivan

 The Patient is the third book in Tim Sullivan's DS Cross series, and it's the one in which Sullivan seems to really hit his stride as regards Cross and his relationship to the other recurring series characters. This is a series best read in publication order, and by the time readers begin The Patient they are fully acquainted with where Cross falls along the spectrum and how his autism affects his perception of the world around him. This allows Sullivan to spend more time exploring Cross's relationship with co-workers, friends, and family more deeply than he has done in previous Cross novels. That he does all of this while presenting an intriguing, complicated mystery to be solved is the icing on the cake. 

When Cross notices a woman sitting in Police Reception over a number of days, his curiosity is aroused enough for him to hear her out even when others in the Bristol police department have come to see the woman as just a nuisance who will never take no for an answer. The woman insists that her daughter was murdered; the police insist that she either committed suicide or died of an accidental overdose. 

Cross initially agrees with the other cops, but three things nag at him so much that he begins to wonder whether or not the woman might just be correct about her daughter's death:

• The young woman died without making any arrangements for the care of her toddler daughter who was alone in the next room.
• She died from an overdose of medical morphine (which is extremely unlikely for an addict to get hold of), not the kind of heroin found on the streets.
• Lab tests confirm that she had been drug-free for at least eighteen months prior to her death.

Cross, against the wishes of his boss and the detective who had earlier closed the case, decides to open a new investigation of his own - and begins his methodical investigation of Flick's death from square one. What follows is a first-rate, blow-by-blow police procedural during which Cross and his team eliminate one suspect after another until the murderer is finally identified.

What makes The Patient special, however, is watching Cross become the caretaker of his father, the man who had devoted so much of his own life to helping Cross make his way in a world that seems so strange and off-putting to him. For perhaps the first time in his life, Cross needs the help of others if he is to cope with all of his responsibilities, and he begins to learn the meaning of friendship and what it is like to have an actual friend or two in his life. 

The Patient is the book in which DS Cross develops into a fully-rounded character, one who has to cope with the problems of an aging father at the same time his job demands are as great as they have ever been. Much is revealed about the detective's childhood and how his mother's disappearance when he was five years old has impacted him to the present day. Sullivan manages to keep The Patient from being an overly melancholy book by developing the relationships between Cross and the two female cops who support his work. Ottey and Mackenzie, by now see Cross as much more than the best detective in the Bristol Police Department. They have come to respect him more than ever, yes, but they like him for who he is. Ottey, especially, has become Cross's mentor, someone he can look to for social tips and tricks that will allow him to function better in the world outside his office. 

The DS Cross series has become a favorite of mine now, and I'm thankful that there are already five other Cross books to be enjoyed - I hope that they keep coming for a long time.

Road Trip 2026 - Part 2 (Albuquerque Breaking Bad Locations)

 I've been trying to make sense of all the photos I took on our recent road trip, and thought it would be a good time to share a few more from the first few days of the trip.

We spent a couple of days looking around Albuquerque, and managed to get off on a bit of a tangent while there. I don't know how many of you are fans of the Breaking Bad or the Better Call Saul series from a few years ago, but be warned that these pictures will only be meaningful if you are the kind of fanatic about them that my grandson and I are. Both series were filmed in Albuquerque for the most part, and these are some of the key homes and businesses used prominently over the years:

This place is even smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside. It played a prominent role in one season in particular, and it is still a working diner today. We had lunch there one day and sat at the same table used by the key actors in the series. The food, and the service, were surprisingly top quality, and the little hot dog diner was packed during the lunch hour while doing a solid business from its takeaway window.

The view of this huge car wash from this side of the building is pretty much exactly as I remember it from the early seasons of Breaking Bad. It's the business through which Walter laundered his drug trafficking profits early on. The interior of the building has been substantially changed, but it was a really smart move on the new owners (a carwash chain) part to put the big letters back on top of the building where they belong. That probably brings in more than a few extra car washes a week...they got me to pony up for one, but I desperately needed it anyway. 

Twisters is a chicken chain in Albuquerque influenced by a Mexican food style of preparing its various offerings. In the Breaking Bad series, the name of the restaurant was changed to Los Pollos Hermanos - the business front of a notorious drug cartel leader. We had an early dinner here when we arrived in Albuquerque, and I have to admit that the food was kind of weird to my taste buds. But we had to try it. 

There were no noticeable changes on the inside of the restaurant, so the television series name of the chicken place is still displayed on the restaurant walls. 

No one is allowed to actually eat at "Walter's" table, but it is OK to take photos at the table with the guy. We couldn't resist, of course, and we took a quick shot of my grandson "sitting" with Walter. 

This motel was often used in the series because it was "shady" enough looking to accommodate all kinds of illegal activity. It's for sale right now, and appears to be largely abandoned. We were warned not to go here too late in the day as the real hotel is in exactly the kind of area that the television series portrays it to be. (We had no problems while pausing to take this picture.)

These are homes scattered around Albuquerque that were used as the residences of several of the main characters in Breaking Bad:

Mike's House

Walter's House

Hank's House

Jesse's House

For the most part, these homes are all in quiet neighborhoods inhabited by folks who are quite used to the idea that lots of people enjoy visiting these homes. The one exception is the "Walter house" in which one of the episodes portrays Walter throwing a pizza on his garage roof in a fit of rage. Idiot fans, over the years, threw so many pizzas on top of the garage that the owners had to build the fence you see in the picture to keep them from getting so close. The home is now for sale again and no one is currently living in it. Neighbors in all four locations are quite welcoming and seem to enjoy the attention that the television series brings...not sure if that helps home resale values or hurts them, honestly.

On our way north out of Albuquerque, headed toward Los Alamos, we found this beautiful spot on the little highway that passes through the heart of an Indian Reservation. 

Next time out, I'll share some photos from Los Alamos and comment on our experience in that unusual city.

Reviews: "King of Ashes," "Every Man a Hero," and "How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder"

 These are three more books that I've been unable to remark on before now - ensuring that my fading memory of them makes it a bit unfair for me to try to do any kind of longish, detailed review of them. Now I'm hoping that these short-form reviews will be enough to give everyone a decent feel for the books.

I'm a big fan of S.A. Cosby's work, but because I thought Cosby's novel just previous to King of Ashes was his weakest effort to date, I was a little concerned that I would be disappointed by this one. Turns out that I shouldn't have worried; this is a good book. It's the story of three adult siblings who have led very different lives up to the date that their father is in a near-fatal auto accident. Now, the eldest returns to their Virginia hometown to help pick up the pieces of a family-run crematorium business that is about to go under because of the bad lifestyle choices made by another of the siblings. What better way to dispose of murder victims than controlling a crematorium? At least that's what one local gang decides, and stopping them is going to be tough. This is quite a crime thriller that the less squeamish readers out there will have some fun with. But be warned, it's very violent (as are most of Cosby's novels).

This 2019 memoir was co-written when Ray Lambert was 98 years old, but it is one of the better firsthand accounts of D-Day that I've come across. Lambert and his brother both were medics on D-Day and both were severely wounded during the fighting. That each of them survived the slaughter of that awful battle is somewhat of a miracle in itself. Lambert tells his personal story from the perspective of a medic as he experienced the fighting in North Africa, Sicily, and France. Mr. Lambert was well decorated the courage he displayed on D-Day, but he reminds the reader that everyone who hit the beaches that day was as much a hero as he was. I recommend this one for history buffs. 

Once upon a time, in Wyoming, there were twelve and thirteen-year-old East Indian sisters who decided that their Uncle Vinny deserved to die. (Because of his regular sexual abuse of the girls, many would probably agree with them.) So they start slipping antifreeze into his drinks over a series of weeks, hoping that will do the trick. How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is very dark comedy with a twist at the end, and it left me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I appreciate the cleverness of the plot and how it uses magazine quiz interludes like the one entitled "Do You Have What It Takes to Kill?" in order to lighten the mood. On the other hand, the novel struck me as trying too hard to be clever at times, and the whole thing seemed to go on longer than the plot demanded it should. This is definitely, however, one coming-of-age story that fans of the genre will want to consider, especially as it explores the meaning of sisterhood and and the lengths almost anyone might go to in order to protect a loved one from the hands of a sexual predator.

This pretty much catches me up on past due reviews. I hope to spend a little more time reviewing Tim Sullivan's The Patient and Sonny Battar's The Daughters of Rosebud, one of my favorite reads of the year, soon.

Road Trip 2026 - Part I

 My grandson and I just completed a road trip of just over two weeks that completely took me out of my reading rhythm - and I'm still struggling to get back into it. I did fall asleep while reading in bed each night, though, and managed to finish one 345-page book while on the road. But things are still so frantic at home, what with dealing with lawyers and tax people concerning the estate problem we are trying to solve, that I just haven't been able to settle back into my old reading patterns even now.  

Despite that, I wouldn't trade those two weeks for anything, so here's just a little taste of the experiences we had while driving over 3700 miles inside the boundaries of nine different states:

This is the "famous" Cadillac Ranch just outside of Amarillo, Texas. As you can see from the photo, the cars have been spray-  painted now by so many people that they are barely recognizable as Cadillacs. The paint is so thick that big sections succumb to gravity every so often and harden on the ground where some enterprising locals scavenge the hardened paint in order to turn it into "jewelry" to be sold to tourist types like us. We did pass on that opportunity despite the rather surprising appeal to the eye of the jewelry tidbits.

We did a good bit of driving on the historical Route 66 that, in theory, still goes from Chicago to Los Angeles. I say "in theory" because much/most of the old route has been covered over by an interstate highway now. But in Adrian, Texas, we did spot this sign across the street from a large gift shop. It marks the official halfway point of the long drive and must have been quite a milestone for travelers to reach in the pre-interstate highway day.

The old gas station/gift shop at the midway point

There's an old "ghost town" called Puerto de Luna near Santa Rosa, New Mexico, that we drove about 20 miles out of our way to take a look at. The funny thing was that we could see it from the road long before we could find a way to reach the surviving buildings. We had no GPS at that point and couldn't find anyone to give us specific directions, but we eventually managed to get a few pictures. It was all kind of sad, really.

 Remains of the 1907 courthouse

Sideview

Main Entrance to old courthouse

Remains of the old county jailhouse

Another view of the old jail

The sad result of the damage done by vandals in recent years

We did end up having a nice chat with the Native American postman who services the tiny community nearest these old buildings who gave us a 30-minute oral history of the area and his tribe. It was quite interesting, and he seemed very proud of his tribal history. He was a nice man, ad we won't soon forget his generosity.

I'm going to stop here for part one of my trip recap. If you would like to see an enlargement of any of the pictures, just click on them and they will expand.

More to come in a day or two.

Three Short Reviews - Three Very Different Books

 I have to keep telling myself that I was only on the road for a little over two weeks because it feels like I've been out of touch a whole lot longer than that. And now I have accumulated nine un-reviewed books to catch up on - and I know that's never going to happen. I'm not even sure that would be fair to the books in question because, honestly, some of them are already starting to get a little bit hazy in my mind.

So I'll try a different approach:

I first read this classic when I was in my early teens, and I remembered it as a great adventure story. As it turns out, Around the World in Eighty Days is that and more. On the surface, it's the story of a wealthy Londoner who bets his fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. He has done the calculations and he is convinced that it's doable. The problem is that there's little room for error, and he's not taken into account a bumbling London detective who is determined to arrest him for a theft our hero is not guilty of. This one is great fun; Vernes even manages to throw in a budding romance that takes a nice turn. This is a very accessible classic that I highly recommend.

Alexandra Oliva's The Radiant Dark is a first-contact novel, but it focuses as much on family dynamics as it does on the alien race fast approaching Earth. It's March of 1980 when a strange flickering in the night sky turns out to be a signal from a planet eleven light-years away. No one knows if they are friendly are not, but over the coming decades messages are exchanged with them as the two civilizations gradually learn to communicate with each other. It all evolves very slowly because of the immense distance between the two planets, but in the meantime people on Earth are forced to reassess their place in the universe. All of this is seen through the eyes of the Girard family and how it impacts the lives of each family member. The Radiant Dark is not the science fiction novel I expected it would be, but if you want a nice blend of scifi and family saga, you will really like this one.

I've read mostly short stories, as opposed to novels, from George Saunders so I don't have much to compare Vigil to. That said, this is one very strange little novel. Jill Blaine, who died in the 1970s, has been a spirit guide of sorts for the last several decades. Her current assignment is to help K.J. Boone, an 87-year-old man, through his deathbed experience. Boone, however, is not at all what Jill is used to; he's a ruthless businessman who feels no remorse at all about how he exploited the planet for his own purposes - and he's not having any of it. Things get complicated when other dead souls show up at Boone's home just to taunt and badger him during his final hours. I have to say that, even as much as I enjoy George Saunders short stories, Vigil just did not work for me at all. Frankly, I was just thankful that it is as short a book as it is. It won't scare me away from the short stories, but I can't recommend this one.

I'll stop with these three for now, hoping that I've given at least enough of a taste of each of them that you'll know whether they are for you or not. I'll get to the others soon, including the one I finished just this morning, The Daughters of Rosebud by Sonny Buttar (I absolutely loved this one.)