Thursday, May 13, 2004
Western RV Park, Magdalena, NM - May 11-13
This was a Passport America park located behind a fairly cute little motel in the very small town of Magdalena. The camping area was basically a gravel parking lot with hookups and one of the brightest security lights we have ever seen. Our main reason for staying here was to visit the nearby Very Large Array Radio Telescope, which is an NSF facility. 
It is comprised of 27 movable parabolic antennas working in unison to make "pictures" of astronomical objects using radio waves. The signals are transmitted from the antennas, which are mounted on railroad tracks, into a computer to process the signals and create the images. It was a very interesting place to visit.Magdalena is a cute little town, which seems to be going through some renovation of its shops and houses.
We visited a very interesting wool processing shop, and an old-fashioned malt shop where we had a delicious snack of onion rings and a chocolate malt (served in the silver mixing container so we actually got about 3 servings!). The nearby Cibola Natl Forest has some lovely areas for hiking and camping, and we spent most of a day at the Water Canyon area hiking and birdwatching. They have a lovely no-hookup campground which would have accommodated us nicely had we known about it. It was free and had no security lights. Also in Water Canyon is the Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research, which mainly studies the effects of lightning, hail and rain from the summer storms. Unfortunately, they were doing road construction, and the facility was not open to the public until later in the summer.# posted by Doug and Willie @ 5:55 PM 
