Business trips are usually intense. You work hard, and are frequently up late in the evening.
To compensate for this, we try to add a little extra to each trip. This month, four of us went to the HiTec conference in Albuquerque. We had free time for dinners, and 5 hours at the end of the conference, between the show closing at noon, and having to be at the airport at 5. That was plenty of additional time for something extra.
Albuquerque has a 10K foot mountain in the city limits, called Sandia Peak. There is a restaurant located on top of it, which you access by a tram. We decided to have our Wednesday dinner on top of the mountain. It was a beautiful 20 minute tram ride up there. Once there, we were unable to eat due to lack of reservations, so we went to the bar, and ate off of the bar menu. I also had a conference call while up there, which I took while standing on a rock ledge, overlooking Albuquerque 5,000 feet below. It was cold up there, and there was still snow on the ground. But the views were incredible, and well worth the cold. We stayed up there until dusk, and then took the tram back to the car.
After the conference ended, we went to see the Petroglyph National Monument. This monument contains a number of Indian petroglyphs dating from 1300 AD that are carved into blocks of lava on the west side of Albuquerque. We walked along several of the trails, checking out the petroglyphs. There were hundreds of them to view. Being an amateur geologist, I was also impressed by the lava flow. We were in a small canyon that at one time had been a hill. The lava had flowed on either side of the hill. In a mere 200,000 years, the hill had eroded, leaving the canyon we were in.
After checking that out, we toured the National Atomic Museum. This is much better suited for engineering nerds, with its collection of rockets, old airplanes, bomb casings, and old radios. I particularly enjoyed studying the engines of a Titan II rocket. I had seen a detailed description of the SpaceX rocket engine, and so I knew what I was looking at. It was also interesting to study the avionics and wiring harnesses used in the planes and rockets.
We have done a number of these “extra” events, but this was definitely one of the best.