You should have gone for it! The VLA is in an amazingly beautiful region. I camped near there once and had the darkest skies I'd ever witnessed, and I saw a mas

You should have gone for it! The VLA is in an amazingly beautiful region. I camped near there once and had the darkest skies I'd ever witnessed, and I saw a massive fireball meteor. Socorro is the nearest proper town to the VLA, with about 9000 residents. It's home to New Mexico Tech. Albuquerque is about an hour's drive from Socorro. I lived in Albuquerque for five years, and four of those years I lived about a mile away from the Breaking Bad car wash... by the time I left, the RV tours were finally starting to trickle off :) Frankly, I found it a pretty pleasant place to live and I'd pick it over the SF area any day. People joke about "the war zone" down by the fairgrounds, and yeah that's probably the roughest part of town, but it's a small region and it still feels less sketchy that many portions of the bay area (I sure as shit never saw anybody smoking fentanyl out on the sidewalks). Almost any part of town north of I-40 is a decent place to live, and big chunks of the city south of I-40 are quite nice too. The natural beauty, and the accessibility of said beauty, is incredible. I lived in the middle of town and could be hiking up the Sandia mountains within 10 minutes. In California, if you want to even dream of camping somewhere, you better have 3 different permits applied for months in advance; in New Mexico, you just go, and maybe you have to drop $5 in the kiosk when you get there. Hunting was amazing; wildlife in general was amazing. One night I hiked up the side of a mountain, slung my hammock, and woke to elk bugling all around me.