White City, NM to Guadalupe Mountain NP in TX

April 27, 2008
The winds were still blowing. We stayed in bed waiting for it to blow itself out, but we finally had to get up. We bundled against the winds and walked down to the deck. A few birds were braving the winds. We decided that today would be a good day to drive!

We stopped in White City, did a little internetting, walked the shops and then headed west. We got to the visitor center of Guadalupe Mountain National Park in time to see some of the exhibits where Will gave the little ground squirrel a finger to gnaw on, to watch the slide show with the squeaky chorus background and get a patch before closing. This park is mostly for the hiker, but some of the views of the mountains from the road show how rugged and vast the American West can be. The mountain is one of three areas where the ancient reef is exposed. The two areas are the Apache Mountains near Van Horn and the Glass Mountains near Alpine; all three are in Texas.

Kathy decided to take us on a wild adventure. She saw the sign for the national park gypsum salt dunes and we decided to go. Well it was about 20 miles back off the road on to a dirt road and we headed for the hills. We dove past irrigated fields. Jack rabbits ran, a roadrunner ran, quail flew off and still we drove on the dirt road….the sand packed road. It went on and on, we didn’t see dunes…well little dunes. We came to a dead end, a gate and pulled off the road and parked for the night.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Houston Fest Galax, VA

Image
We arrived in Galax, VA and stopped at our friend, Harold's. He was just putting the finishing touches on a cake he made for his nephew.  Harold is great in the kitchen! Brenda arrived!  We had a nice meet and greet. We went to the school across the street with Brenda and Harold and met Linda who likes hugs. Each day the three of them and others from the community volunteer to prepare backpacks of food items for children who otherwise would good the weekend hungry. They have fund raisers to get money and purchase food items that children can manage for breakfast and lunch.  They also get donations.  There is a man in Florida that heard about their need for food so ships items from Amazon.com for them to distribute. They get everything organized then run an assembly line to package items. The bags are then sent to the classrooms where the teachers put them in the children's backpacks so that no one is called to any attention. Time to head to Houston Fest whose missio...
Read more

Navy Buddies

Image
Today is a good day to drive! We drove across Amarillo, TX to visit with Will's Navy buddy, Ron.  We found him in the same park we had met him in about ten years ago. These two men met fifty years ago aboard The USS Platte.  ( Platte  made almost yearly deployments to the western  Pacific Ocean  from 1960 to 1968, including extensive operations in  Vietnamese  waters and refueling the  USS  Enterprise  (CVN-65)  task group off Korea during the  Pueblo incident . Platte served with the Pacific Fleet into 1970. She was sold for scrapping on 14 May 1971.)   Ron suggested La Fiesta Grande for an early dinner, a great Mexican place.  It was fun listening to the stories all starting with, "Do you remember...." We dropped Ron back off at home and met Don, a neighbor. See you again somewhere sometime, Ron. Okay, so check out these drinks that were delivered to the next table!
Read more

Our Own Palm Tree

Image
December 15, 2007 We woke parked at the Walmart; we have a nice spot we like way off to one side where we face a little lawn and have our own palm tree. Not many people park in this area because it is farther to walk into the store; at night a few other overnighters park in the lot, but they park up with the trucks so we pretty much have this area to ourselves. From there we drove to Victor Park, a community park with tennis courts, picnic area and fields for sports. The restrooms were locked, but no biggie as we have our own facilities. Will started up the generator and worked on a letter to the Chevy Guy in New Brunswick he has been formulating in his mind ever since we left Canada. The Roadtrek just stopped one day and we had to have it towed and lucky for us it was to a Chevy repair garage. We had our fuel tank fixed and they cut the fill tube. Roadtrek had designed a specialty one they didn’t have so they just jury rigged one. Fixed they said; we paid the bill of over a thousand d...
Read more