Roswell, Day 1

 Got home yesterday from the whirlwind trip.  'Twas amazing.

Getting to Roswell was blessedly uneventful, except for having to be at the airport by 5:30.  Ugh.  First stop was Dallas, with pretty good timing of Mike's flight from Boston landing about a half-hour after mine.

Then cue the talkfest, because that's what Mike and I do (I woke up this morning with a rough throat and a bit of a cough, and of course my first thought was that I caught something on the trip - but then realized that I talked more in four days than I do in an average month).

Quick background on the Roswell/alien thing.  The "Roswell Incident" happened in 1947 when "alien debris" was found - the government claimed it was a weather balloon, later released that it was a more sophisticated balloon designed to detect Soviet bomb tests.  Things went quiet for a couple of decades until the Atlas F missile program was ended and the military base at Roswell closed down in 1967.  Losing the base was a huge economic blow to the small town.  Somehow they came up with the idea of capitalizing on the alien theme, and the town now gets some 200,000 tourists a year, and there is a big annual alien festival.  We saw ads for a dentist ("get an out-of-this-world smile") and stores like the intergalactic vape shop.

So - we arrived at the Roswell airport.

Mike had been studying maps and directions, so we got our rental car and drove around to see our old stomping grounds.  It was strange, because other than visiting our first apartment here in Tallahassee, I've never gone back to anywhere that I've lived before.  Sad to say, after 60 years, the old neighborhood has gotten rather run down.  Then we headed out to the missile site.  20 miles away from Roswell, there is nothing to see from horizon to horizon of flat desert, with oil derricks pumping away (those things used to scare me when I was a kid).

We eventually spotted our Air BnB.

We were met by Raul, the owner's assistant (I have now realized that I did not get pictures of either Gary or Raul - my bad).  He showed us around the outside - there's a large cement pad over the missile silo, with the 150 ton blast doors - more on those later.  Finally we went in and down the first flight of stairs.  This shot is from the bottom of the stairs looking back up to the rather substantial door.

A couple more short flights of stairs took us to our apartment, which used to be the sleeping quarters for the missile crew.

The red thing above Mike's head is the escape hatch that leads up to the surface.  The big white structure in the middle is the support for the tonnage of dirt and cement over our heads.

We talked with Gary for a few hours (and Raul cooked a delicious dinner for us).  Gary is passionate and obsessed and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the cold war era missile programs and sites, and knows far more about Dad's career than we did.  Before we crashed for the night, we went into the missile silo itself.  When I first heard about Gary's AirBnB, I assumed that we would be in the apartment, and only allowed into the silo when escorted.  Not true.  Guests can go in there any time (musicians say that the acoustics are amazing)

We went out our apartment door, down a couple more flights of stairs, through a tunnel, and onto a landing about 40 feet underground.  The silo is mind-boggling: it's 75 feet across and almost 190 feet (some 14 stories) deep.  Although the landing has hand rails, I definitely felt some acrophobia.

Overhead were the 150 ton blast doors which would be opened for the missile to be brought up on an elevator before firing.  Due to a design flaw in the Atlas F missiles, on four occasions (three in Roswell, one in Oklahoma) the missiles would explode in the silo (fortunately without the nuclear warheads).  On at least one of these times, the 150 ton blast doors were blown completely off and thrown out into the desert.

This was enough for us for one day.  Time to crash.