I first visited New Mexico in 1996 as part of my doctorate in astrophysics, in order to use the radio telescope facilities of the Very Large Array, situated fifty miles west of the small town of Socorro, an hour's drive south of Albuquerque, the main city in the state. I did not have much chance for sightseeing beyond Socorro, not having my own transport. My supervisor and I did try to visit Acoma Pueblo, a Native American site to the west of Albuquerque, but unfortunately on arrival we found that we had come on one of the few days during the year on which it was closed to visitors.
In the United Kingdom, New Mexico is probably best known for atomic bombs and aliens. Los Alamos was the base of the secretive Manhattan Project during World War II, which led to the Trinity test in 1945 and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Meanwhile the small town of Roswell on the other side of the state has achieved notoriety for the alleged crash of an alien spacecraft in 1947 and subsequent cover-up by the military and government.
However, I had learned that there was much more to New Mexico, with the highlights being the vast Carlsbad Caverns in the southeast of the state, the dunes of White Sands in the centre, and the long histories of various cultures (Native Americans, Spanish/Mexicans, and English-speaking settlers).
Having six hundred dollars' worth of vouchers from United Airlines as a result of being bumped the previous year, flights would not be a major expense. Rather than endure in one day the three flights required to reach Albuquerque from Heathrow on United, I opted to make stopovers in each direction. Chicago was one obvious stop, and Philadelphia or Boston were under consideration for the other when my brother Jeff's relocation to Maryland became definite. Thus I arranged for my return leg stopover to be at Washington over the Memorial Day weekend (coincident with the Spring Bank Holiday in the UK), with four nights in Chicago outbound before a fortnight touring New Mexico.