Getting the flavor of...A space trip out West

A space trip out West

“New Mexico has long drawn scientists and stargazers,” said Kari Bodnarchuk in The Boston Globe. By driving the newly designated New Mexico Space Trail, you can marvel at the fruits of their labors. After stopping in Albuquerque at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science for a “good overview of how ancient cultures used the stars,” visit some of the state’s pueblo ruins to test your new knowledge. On the Plains of San Agustin, you’ll find a visitors center near the 27 giant, dish-shaped antennas that together form perhaps the world’s most productive radio telescope. There’s also a museum at the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was tested. In Alamogordo, the New Mexico Museum of Space History is home to a flight suit worn by the first space chimp. “The mother ship of all things otherworldly,” however, is the International UFO Museum, located in Roswell. It’s an “information-rich emporium” of flying-saucer evidence and folklore.

Wisconsin’s little Iceland

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Icelanders first immigrated to Wisconsin’s Washington Island in 1870, and their influence is still felt, said Lori Rackl in the Chicago Sun-Times. To witness this heritage, head to the tip of Door Peninsula, which separates Lake Michigan from the waters of Green Bay, and take a ferry across the “shipwreck-laden strait of Death’s Door.” Aside from the Nordic names on “weathered gravestones,” the Icelandic influence is evident in restaurants serving crepes covered in cherry sauce and in the occasional Icelandic horse. “These small, sturdy, shaggy-maned horses have one more gait than most of the world’s equines”—a fifth gait, called a tolt, that “resembles a fast, smooth trot.” At the Norse Horse Park, you can also see Icelandic chickens and sheep, on a tour of a working farm. Nearby Rock Island, which can be reached on a ferry called the karfi, is now a wooded, uninhabited state park, home to Wisconsin’s oldest lighthouse and a millionaire’s former Viking boathouse.