Today I’ve ticked off state number 43 from my life list. When I say “ticked off” I mean that I’ve put a checkmark next to it on the list of states I’ve visited, not that I’m endeavoring to make every state upset in some way. We could debate the criteria for what counts as visiting a state: passing through its airspace surely doesn’t count; and I don’t think simply transferring in an airport without going out of security counts, otherwise I’d have a couple more. What about driving in a car through it? That’s a gray area. But this one definitely counts, as I have boots on the ground.
I’m in New Mexico for the first time, where tonight I’m speaking to the Los Alamos Science and Faith Forum. And as always, when I’m traveling somewhere I try to pack in as much potential to see interesting things and for interesting things to happen.
I was out the door in Goshen this morning at 4:45am, to get to the South Bend airport for my 6:15am flight. I have (mostly) good-natured arguments with people about whether flying out of our tiny regional airport is a good strategy, or whether you’re better off driving the 100 miles to Chicago’s Midway Airport (or 125 to O’Hare). Since switching my allegiance and frequent flier miles from United to Delta, I’ve been pretty firmly on team SBN. United would only fly to O’Hare and seemed to be delayed at least half the time. Delta gets you to ATL, MSP, or DTW and has more than a 90% success rate (as well as a lounge culture I’ve become accustomed to). So when you take into account the relative ease of flying out of South Bend, I’ve used it pretty consistently.
Most of the time I fly from there, I can I go from the parking lot through security in less than 10 minutes. Today was… interesting. It’s about 40 minutes from our place in Goshen, so leaving 90 minutes before your flight leaves would be cutting it kind of close. But again, it’s easy-peasy… until TSA is understaffed and decides to train a new luggage scanner. I couldn’t believe how long the line was. And even for us seasoned-traveler TSAPre folks, it took us 45 minutes to get through security.
So… doing the math, that left 5 minutes before the plane left. My gate was clear at the other end (which at SBN isn’t that far, but still...). But it turned out they waited, knowing that 20 people who had checked in hadn’t boarded yet. That was nice of them… except I only had 40 minutes layover in ATL. And that airport is a little bigger. So every minute we waited for another passenger to get through security in SBN, put more of us at risk of missing our connections. We ended up leaving about 15 minutes late.
So… doing the math, that leaves 25 minutes in ATL. Yikes. En route I discovered that we were coming into concourse D, and my flight to ABQ was leaving from concourse B. Yikes again. We did make up 10 minutes in the air, and so I still had 35 minutes. I busted out of the plane and found myself clear at the end of concourse D in gate 5. Yikes again. That’s a lot of dodging in and out of people as I walked very briskly toward the trains through the very crowded terminal. Going down the escalator I saw that the train was there, so made a dash to get into it before the doors closed, which I did… and found it funny that they were still open after standing there catching my breath for a bit. Then an announcement came on that said, “this train is experiencing technical difficulties, but we expect it to be working again shortly.” How many “yikes” can be compounded before something bad actually happens? Do I run for it in those underground tunnels from D to B?? Nope. I decided I’m not running, and that if I miss my plane, I’ll figure out something else.
Long story just a bit longer: standing there in the motionless train I got the notification that my plane was now boarding. The train started up about 2 minutes later and got me to concourse B. My gate? 3 -- all the way at the end of that concourse. More brisk walking and weaving in and out of people. As I got to the gate, I saw about 3 people left in line checking in. Phew. Made it.
Once in Albuquerque, things went pretty smoothly: rental car shuttle was waiting; fancy status with Hertz means no counters, but just walk up and get in a car and drive away. First stop: Petroglyph National Monument.
Colin and I have been to see petroglyphs in Arizona (didn’t I write about that? I can’t find any posts about it), and some really old ones in Azerbaijan (which I did write about). I saw this national park had some too, and had time to kill, so went and had a look. Of course in the Americas, they’re not going to be super-old. It looks like these started within the last thousand years. But still pretty cool to stand a rock where someone else did that long ago and… made some art? or put up religious symbolism? or just vandalized the neighborhood with graffiti?
For some reason, the little dragonfly on the last one is my favorite.
Next stop in Albuquerque was intended to be some Breaking Bad locations. Normal, middle-aged men have fantasies about breaking bad… I mean… I’ve heard that they do… and find that really troubling. I looked up where Walter White’s house is, and just about decided to go see it. But then saw a news story about the people who actually live there feeling terrorized by all the fans who stop by and throw pizzas on the roof. I wasn’t planning to do that, but figured I didn’t need to go that bad. Instead, I’d have lunch at Los Pollos Hermanos and look at all the despicable middle aged men there pretending to do drug deals. I was on a Breaking Bad wiki of some sort and saw an address, so popped it into Google maps and drove there… only to find nothing. Looking at the wiki again, that was the address where the restaurant supposedly was in the show, but in real life, the restaurant can be found at this other address. Oops. Popping that into Google maps showed I was 25 miles in the wrong direction. So I gave up on my fantasy and have decided I should probably stick with my actual life, which is still pretty interesting.
For instance, tonight I’m giving a talk to a bunch of (probably?) middle-aged scientists at the Los Alamos Science and Faith Forum, called “Did God Guide Our Evolution?” (which if you fantasize about attending such events, I think you can do so virtually on their webpage).
Tomorrow I’ll report on whether I persuaded everyone of the correct answer to the question in my title, and hopefully have another adventure with a local friend seeing some other cool old things.