For many years, we’ve been trying to get on the Behind the Fence tour at Los Alamos for our Manhattan Project quest. We’ve visited the publicly-accessible areas, but really want to do this special tour, which is only offered for a few tours, twice a year, to 16 people per tour. We were hopeful each year, at least until the movie Oppenheimer was released, when suddenly everyone else wanted to go too. In what has become a biannual tradition, we were not selected in the lottery again this spring and were moved to the supposed waitlist.

A few weeks later, Jen received an email that her name had been pulled from the list, and she was offered the chance to attend (and bring one guest—sure hope she chooses me! 🤞😆). I’m excited—we’re finally going to mark this as done!

The timing isn’t great for optimizing PTO, as the available tours are only on Tuesday or Wednesday morning. So our original plan was for me to start driving towards Albuquerque in the morning with our stuff, then Jen would catch a cheap flight over right after work, where I’d pick her up at the airport and drive us up to a hotel in Los Alamos. We’d do the four-hour tour the next morning, then drive back and she’d fly home, while I camped in the mountains on my way back home. That would only require a single day of vacation time, and we’d save money on a second flight and a rental car.

Alas, a bit more thinking has us considering taking both Monday and Tuesday off, combining it with the prior Fri-Sat-Sun that she has off and making it a five day weekend instead. Jen would still fly out of ABQ after the tour and I would still drive. But the question now is: where does she fly into?

There seem to be four primary options. First is just sticking with Albuquerque. We still have a number of things on our to-do list between there and the Colorado border. But that’s also an easy long weekend trip for us. With five days off, we should go further afield or at least plan a longer drive.

We haven’t been to a few counties in eastern New Mexico, so another option would be flying into El Paso, then looping up around eastern New Mexico and circling back to Los Alamos. That’d finish the state for both of us. But again, it’s still three day weekend territory for us.

Two more distant options would be Lubbock and Denver, both of which would require an overnight stay on the way there. Lubbock would allow us to mark off a bunch of the Texas panhandle, plus probably grab those New Mexico counties, too. But the flight time is less than ideal, and it happens to be the most expensive of the flight options, too.

Denver, on the other hand, is the cheapest flight, though also the longest drive for me. We could either head south through the mountains, maybe even raft on the Arkansas or Rio Grande on the way down (perhaps a bit early in the season though), though none of it would be new territory for us.

Or, we could swing out to southwestern Kansas and catch a slice of Oklahoma and Texas before making our way west to Los Alamos. That’d catch a bunch of new counties for us (it’s one of the largest holes in my travel map) and might fit pretty well into the four days before the tour. It seems like the leading candidate at the moment.

We’ve already booked the tour (that’s definitely the priority!), and the flight home, so now it’s just about deciding what the initial starting point will be. Decisions, decisions…