2013 04 04 - Albuquerque, NM to Carlsbad, NM

• Itinerary

Start - Albuquerque Central KOA, New Mexico
Stop - Carlsbad KOA, New Mexico
Distance - 300 miles
Time - 5 hours
Route

• Summary of the Day

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
Just a few miles away from the KOA is great little museum dedicated to explaining the history of nuclear science - explaining a wide variety of background from war to popular culture.

As part of the warfare exhibits it has a small collection of airplanes and other weaponry from the Cold War including life size mockups of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs used to end the war with Japan.

Lillber enjoyed the planes outside.

B-29 Just like Grandpa Keith Robar used to fly in WW2

Unfortunately, we found out that the last fully flying B-29 out of Dallas had just been to Albuquerque the previous day!  They had even given flights and let kids explore the full plane.  By one day! Darn.

Getting Luna a Checkup
With so much driving last summer and now a hard push from Seattle all the way to New Mexico, I had that feeling that I'd be better safe than sorry to get Luna some new oil and a quick checkup while we took the boys to lunch and another museum stop.

We had decided to head downtown for lunch so I found a fantastic RV service and repair shop nearby 'Old Town' and dropped Momma and the boys off to find a restaurant while I took Luna to the service shop.

The folks at Statkus Engines were very helpful and the price was great ($90 for oil, filter, check the tires, etc). They are a little hard to find but close to the I-40 and Old Town. There service was fast and efficient and they even gave me a ride to the restaurant back in Old Town and offered to pick us up when the RV was ready.  5 out of 5 for going the extra mile on customer service.

Albuquerque 'Old Town'
Just SW of the I-25 and I-40 interchange and west of the new downtown is the Old Town art and shopping district. Worth the trip for the nice walking area and food, etc.

High Noon for lunch
Momma found a nice little Mexican restaurant and the food was great. After a nice lunch there we split up so Momma could try to find a pedicure while I took the boys to the Titanic exhibit.


New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Titanic Artifact Exhibition

This was for PezMiner. He has read up and researched a lot about the Titanic - probably starting with the great series for kids, The Magic Treehouse. Albuquerque's Natural History museum is just a couple of blocks away from the High Noon and the rest of Old Town.

We spent most of our time wandering through the temporary Titanic artifacts portion of the museum. At the start you are given a ticket for one of the passengers of the titanic and you won't find out until the end whether your name is from one of the survivors or fatalities. Along the way are multiple actual recovered items plus paintings, photos and videos from the visits to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Here's their website for the exhibit (until Oct 2013): http://nmnaturalhistory.org/titanic

All three of our tickets were survivors from Third Class passengers. I was amazed at just how many crew members there were and most of the fatalities were crew (over 700 crew members perished).

We finished up, got picked up by the nice folks from Statkus and were back on the I-40 and headed towards the famous Roswell, New Mexico and then to Carlsbad.

Roswell - not just a quirky little town
Momma drove for a while once we were headed south towards Roswell. She stopped to let me drive in town in case we had any tricky turns to deal with. While we stopped the boys took the time to scooter in the large empty parking lot for a quick break.

We made it to Roswell too late to see the UFO museum unfortunately!  The biggest surprise to me was just how big Roswell actually is as a town. Its rather large actually.  I had expected a one street village with a UFO themed bar and diner. Not so. At least three Sonic drive ins that we counted (which has become our measure of how large a southern USA town is - it seems to be the dominant fast food in this part of the country).

We pushed on a bit further and got to our next KOA campground for the night just to the north of the town of Carlsbad.

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