I'll need to buy more map pins before our Northeastern trip next Spring for the Boston Marathon!
On Thursday, I stopped at Picacho State Park. Close to Tucson, it was a convenient location.
Saguaro cactus, now that's a gorgeous cacti!
Our trail time was less than 2 hours. Do you know how difficult it is to keep his boots on while protecting him from all the things in a desert environment that want to poke, scratch, sting, cut and poison him?
Possible explanation for the lack of tree huggers in the Southwest.
A quick side trip, on an Indian reservation, sits San Xavier monastery. The main building is balanced and beautiful, but who added that ornate portal? I bet the original architect is rolling in his grave.
On Friday morning, I had the bright idea to drive straight from Las Cruces, NM to Auburn, AL. Apart from a mess of dates and two bags of pistachios (straight from the farm!), I was down to my last bit of food from home: dehydrated apples.
Yes, there were grocery stores on the way, but budget travel means sticking to your predetermined expense cap. The two extra motel stays (my fear of coyotes getting Cole) had bumped me into the red. I've had a chance to calculate all my expense, including the $2 coffees: $ 785. That's $ 52 per day. A wee bit more than El Cheapo had wanted to spend.
But then, I spent $ 3 more on my entrance fee to White Sands National Monument, NM.
Plowed roads through the sand. How cool is that?
This is the largest gypsum sand dune field in the world: 275 sq. miles...easy to get lost here. Regular silica based sand (beaches, Mojave Desert) is different than gypsum sand because gypsum is water soluble. That's why this place is so unique. Ordinarily, the first rain would dissolve the gypsum and carry it away. Here, number one, it seldom rains; two, the dunes sit in a prehistoric lake bed, even when water enters the area and melts the gypsum, it has nowhere to go. The moisture eventually evaporates and the dunes remain intact. So much gypsum has siphoned into the area from the runoff from neighboring gypsum mountains that the Tularosa Basin is 2000 feet deep with the stuff!
Can you tell we had more fun here than in Arizona? Next door is the White Sands Missile Testing Range and the Holloman Air Force Base. F-22's were flying overhead, going sonic, and producing very loud cannon booms. Very cool!
I should have put his Doggles (canine sunglasses) on. It was blindingly bright.
A few hours later, we were back on the road.
Within a half hour, I was driving through Lincoln National Forest and back up over 5000 feet. I stopped at a ski resort to let Cole stretch. I had just come from the beach and I got some odd looks from the folks all bundled up in their Winter clothes.
A hundred year old railroad trestle bridge. 335 feet high. The conductor would always lose logs on this route from the logging areas back down to the canyon. In spite of this, the train became a tourist attraction...Victorian daredevils!
What on Earth is a large, expensive, bronze statue of a French Canadian voyageur and his Indian companion doing in the middle of nowhere, NM? And I mean nowhere. I prefer to drive long distances in silence. On this trip, it wasn't a preference as much as a given. I'd forgotten to pack any CD's and many, many times I scanned the FM band to find zero radio stations. I wanted solitude and, by golly, I got it.
Eventually, I learned that the area in NM that I had crossed and the next area of Midland, TX was in an second oil boom. New fracking technology had uncorked previously unreachable reserves. Before the sun set, I could see a haze all the way to the horizon. The stench of this toxic fog was overwhelming. Cole was in the backseat grumbling and snorting. It wasn't until I was many miles on I-10 before the air cleared. I breath in chemicals at work every day. Every morning, I hack and cough for a couple hours until I can breath again. It wasn't until the second week of my trip that my chronically sore throat felt normal again. But, it's my choice to make a living this way. That's why I'm adamant that my home be a safe zone, no pesticides, no chemicals, no perfumes. But, these poor people...it's 24/7, unavoidable toxic soup. Kids, everybody has to ingest it. All for petroleum. I'm being a bit hypocritical here, because I burned 115 gallons of gas on my 5200 mile trip, or maybe I feel guilty for being a cog in the wheel.
Thanks be to the good friends who kept me engaged in phone conversation many times during that approx. 20 hour marathon drive.
It was beyond wonderful to drive onto the farm Saturday night. I had everything unpacked and washed by 10 PM, enough time left over to play with the newest members of my rock collection.
Tip of the hat to everyone who have once again supported me at home and on the road. Mean it!
