After a long delay, I'm going to start journaling our road trip of the past month! I plan to split it all into a handful of entries over the next week or two, since we went a lot of places and this would become a very long blog post if I were to catalog all our travels in one go.Since the last update, when we were in Lincoln, NE, we stopped in...
Amarillo, Texas. We decided not to go to the
tourist trap that is the restaurant serving 72oz steaks. I only really mention
Amarillo because it is in Texas, and it helps illustrate how ridiculously large Texas is, and how often we went back
and forth between New Mexico and Texas. Also, we had Texas-shaped waffles there.
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| Texas-Shaped Waffles |
Carlsbad Caverns National Park (New Mexico). A
truly impressive cavern, and by far the biggest either of us has ever seen. The
elevator was out of order, so we made the pleasant hike down to the main
chamber, which is richly decorated with every imaginable variety of cave formation. We had the entire campsite to ourselves and enjoyed spectacular sunsets over the Guadalupe Mountains from a short hike out of our campsite. On the whole a very relaxed, quiet time, without many other people around.
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| The Entrance to the Cave |
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| Chandelier Formation, Carlsbad Caverns |
Guadalupe Mountains National Park (Texas again). We
just waved at it as we drove past/through, and didn’t bother to stop for a
picture with the sign. It made for a beautiful drive though!
White Sands National Monument (New Mexico again). A
unique spot, with white gypsum salt sand dunes in a valley surrounded by
mountains, some tipped with recent spring snows. The sand is surprisingly cool
to the touch, and we hiked barefoot, as that apparently is one of the things to
do there. Sledding is the other, but we passed on that. This was, if I remember rightly, the first truly hot day of our trip.
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| White Sands, New Mexico |
El Paso, Texas (again). We enjoyed the absolute best Mexican food we have ever been privileged to encounter ever here, at a place called Maribu’s. We love border states/towns.
Rock Hound State Park (New Mexico, again!) A
wonderfully friendly campground host who found a space for us in an
already-overfilled campground started off our time here on the right note, and
the brilliant night sky and surprisingly pretty lights of the small town on the
plains below kept the pleasant feel going. We enjoyed nothing but positive experiences with camp ground hosts this vacation, and serving as campground hosts is now our current retirement plan. In the morning we hunted for
interesting rocks and kept a few, since you’re allowed/encouraged to.
Pheonix, Arizona (and Tucson, Sedona, Flagstaff, Jerome, and Prescott, AZ as well). After stopping briefly at Saguaro National Park in Tucson, a surprisingly lush piece of desert, we visited my brother Erik and
his girlfriend Dalyss, spending time at a rodeo (surprisingly interesting) and
hiking on “South Mountain” (there’s a South Mountain by Messiah College too,
and probably several other places). We then headed up to the Sedona area, where the
landscape transforms dramatically from the heat and desert of Pheonix. Sedona
lies surrounded by spectacular red rock cliffs and buttes, forested with pine. Further north, we ate supper in Flagstaff, which felt to me a lot like a
Colorado Ski town, which it basically is. Snowy mountains, people with skis strapped to their car roofs, and great places to walk around and eat. We also visited some
long-abandoned pueblo sites, called Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well (apparently the Spanish conquistadors, whose place names we use today, thought Montezuma was pretty important). Having only been to far Northern Arizona (think Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest), we really enjoyed getting to see pretty much the whole entire rest of the state!
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| Saguaro National Park |
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| Sedona |
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| Montezuma's Castle |
I'll pick up with Joshua Tree next time!
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