INDY MEETS INCA: Noleta resident Joe Alarid joined nearly 20 of his family members on a trip this summer to Ecuador, where they took in the cities of Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca, the Galapagos Islands, and the rainforest, and marveled at hummingbirds, the use of “Ellwood Cooper’s accursed eucalyptus” in construction, a blossoming recycling program, and the low price of gas. Here, Alarid contemplates a copy of The Santa Barbara Independent’s Higgs boson cover story near the Inca Temple of the Sun, a site 10,445 feet in the mountains called Ingapirca. “Ecuador looks just like California,” said Alarid, who recently retired from the defense industry, “and the mountains around Quito are brown as in Santa Barbara this time of year.”