It has been more then a month since I have posted. I really haven't had time or good internet to be able to be able to post. Although I can use my phone to tether from, I have been using a lot of data so I don't want to use it on the blog. It takes more to upload the pictures.
To catch up what we have been doing is that after we left Palm Springs we went to Acton for 2 weeks. We realized with Gracie's first birthday coming up we would be driving into Ventura every day so we decided to come back to Santa Paula for birthday week.
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| Birthday Girl |
After we left Santa Paula we went back to Palm Springs for a week. We then went to Earp, CA which is across the Colorado River from Parker, Az. The picture is from the Arizona side looking across at our RV Park. It is called Emerald Cove RV Resort.
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| Emerald Cove RV |
The funny thing about it is that although it is in California, the entire Parker strip as they call it use Arizona time, even on the California side. Legally it was one hour earlier, but all the businesses use the later time.
We stayed a week here and really enjoyed it. One night three wild burros came into camp. Here one of them is in front of our rig.
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| Wild Burro's |
We are now in Las Vegas. We are here for three weeks but will be coming home for Thanksgiving.
On Wednesday we did the Nevada National Test Site tour. It is an all day free monthly tour that you need to book 5 to 6 months in advance.
You are loaded into a nice motorcoach at the Atomic Museum in Vegas. They take you to the test site about 70 miles outside of Vegas. You are assigned badges and they are checked at the security check. A soldier comes on the bus and actually touches and checks the front and back of each and every badge. No cameras or phones or computers or even binoculars are allowed on the tour so from now on all pictures are photos I found on the internet but do properly describe what we saw!
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| Security Check |
Obviously I won't show or describe the whole tour as it was from 8:00-4:00 and about 250 miles, but the highlights were as follows.
The Aluminum Domes were setup to see if they could stand up to the atomic blast. Not only did they crumble but when you looked into the whole they were actually melted. 6" thick cement also did not hold up, but 2' thick did.
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| Aluminum Domes |
This train trestle is warped and mangled. This was from a bomb dropped from a plane about 1600 feet away.
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| Train Trestle |
The bank vault held up. The contents were fine although it was said the contents were warm inside.
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| Bank Vault |
We went by a low level waste dump. I was surprised that it was not buried deeper then it was. They put the waste in train containers and then put them in pits maybe 20 feet deep.
The bus drove down into a fairly shallow crater. The Bilby crater is about 80 feet deep. This one is created by an underground explosion.
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| Bilby Crater |
The Apple II House is one of the houses you saw in the old newsreel films with the mannequins in them. Because of all the reinforcing in the house it actually held up during the blasts.
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| Apple II House |
The Sedan Crater is the worlds largest man made crater at 320 feet deep and 1280 feet across. A 104 kilaton bomb displaced 6.5 million cubic yards of dirt. This was a test to consider using nuclear for clearing large areas of dirt and rocks. The project was called ploughshare.
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| Sedan Crater |
That's it for today. We will try not to make it so long next time!
God Bless,
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