We are in New Mexico right now visiting museums.

This place is a lot of fun and they have cool T-shirts of various objects rendered as mazes.

http://www.nuclearmuseum.org/store-home/

I haven't heard of that museum ... definitely one to log in my must visit list. Love the shirts.

Austin,
You might consider checking out the Indian Cultural Heritage Center in ABQ while you're in NM. My kids loved it last year. There's also Explora, which is their version of a children's museum and their Natural History Museum.

Oo! Oo! We visited that museum 8 years ago at its old location. It was called the National Atomic Museum then. We loved it. It was my favorite museum ever (but I'm a nuclear physics junkie, so...).

Can you still walk right to all the airplanes and missiles on display?

DS9 was exactly a year old that day, and he slapped an H-bomb to celebrate his birthday. As I recall, it made a neat sound.

They had a wonderful exhibit about the Navajo tribesmen whose language confused the living daylights out of the Japanese military, as well as some great books on the subject.

Val

This place is wonderfully quirky: American International Rattlesnake Museum

And the Petroglyph National Monument is great, too.

Enjoy!

My son would love this museum, as he is also extremely interested in nuclear physics.
Here is the official link about Navajo Code Talkers.
http://www.navajocodetalkers.org/

The museum is in new digs. Very impressive. Lots of GT kids running around. All kinds of equipment you could touch and planes and rockets to touch.

One famous .mil person ( I will withold the name) was giving a tour.

We got a tour from a very nerdy retired nuke scientist who gave us the "techy" tour. We could have spent all day there. We only got 1/3 of the way through. We had reservations later that day. Next time we will spend all day.

We did spend the whole day there. The tours were being given by retirees at that time too, and they were all very friendly. They let my husband and I take turns going in and out of the museum while DS napped in the car (he used to nap for 3+ hours). When he woke up, we took him back inside, which was when they let him slap the H bomb.

Val

Welcome to NM, Austin (you may have left by now)!

In Albq-EXPLORA!, Albq Zoo, Aquarium & Biopark (these 3 have one entrance fee and don't miss the biopark for the age of your son!), NM Museum of Natural History & Science, Rio Grande Nature Center, International Balloon Museum (hot air balloons), volcanoes/Petroglyph National Monument, UNM's Museum of Indian something, NM Museum of History and Art? (great conquistador armor & weaponry), Sandia Tram, etc. Hope you saw some of those.

North of Albuquerque is Bandolier National Monument (go see the Valles Caldera, Jemez Pueblo, etc.) which is close to Los Alamos where the Bradbury Science Museum is located (rivals the Nuclear Museum!)