August 5th

Los Alamos! This is where both of us grew up. We are visiting the Sampsons and Robby's Father and his wife Connie. Los Alamos is where the first atomic bomb was developed, and we grew up under it's looming shadow.

Yesterday Robby took a bike ride with Ray and Connie from the Española turnoff 8 miles into Española. It was a beautiful day, in the low 80's and clear. They rode to Blake's and had lunch, then rode back. The trip was about 17 miles total. Lynne hung out with her mom, went out to eat lunch at the Blue Window and watched a movie. A great low-key day.

Ray and Connie cooked dinner on the grill which was delicious. Later that evening we both went to Laura McNamara's quad near Urban Park in Los Alamos and ate cookies and talked about her PhD work up here in Anthropology. She is examining the culture of displacement among Lab scientists as the Lab hierarchy changes due to the end of the Cold War. Her sister Amy will be coming up to visit tomorrow and we will see the both of them. Please refer to the San Francisco pages for more on Amy!

August 6th

We went to Dad's "company picnic" up at the ski hill for lunch. He works as a contractor for the DX Division making databases in FileMaker Pro. DX stands for Dynamic Experimentation but we think it really means detonators and explosives because that is a lot of what they do. We met a number of the people he works with -- all engineers. Very nice folks.

In the afternoon we went for a walk in the canyon and looked at some of Robby's old boyhood haunts -- "Bouldertown," sites of old forts, etc. Even on such a beautiful day no one else was out so we had the canyon to ourselves. Really nice. Later that evening we went to the Sampsons for dinner and hung out there for a while.

	The apricots are out this year...
	Ray working on his bike. This is the one he rode across the USA.
	Downtown Los Alamos
	Near the High School in Los Alamos
	Don't we look happy? The tower behind us was used to house measuring instruments during the Navada tests.
	Dad and Connie at the DX picnic
	Lynne at the picnic. The Los Alamos ski hill is behind her
	Robby at the end of Barranca Mesa, Los Alamos is behind him
	One of the rocks in Bouldertown where we built our forts. This one particular boulder Jonathan liked a lot!
	Robby at Bouldertown. As kids, this whole countryside was our playground
	Lynne hiking up to Barranca Mesa