A Few Days in Southern New Mexico

We pass through the mining country of southern Arizona and back into New Mexico, which is a very quick hundred miles or so if you stick to Interstate 10 - kinda like driving this same highway through Mississippi or Alabama, and saying you've visited these states. (The 800+ miles it courses through Texas really does qualify as "seeing the state.")

We stop for a few days in Deming to do a little rock-hounding at (where else) Rockhound State Park, and also to visit City of Rocks State Park about 40 miles out of town. This trip we discovered a museum in town that exemplifies the gifts of our RVing lifestyle. We could have spent a whole day at the Deming Luna Membres Museum and not seen all the tens of thousands of items and artifacts housed in this community sponsored and maintained center of local culture - everything from 500 to 800-year old pots and pottery shards donated by local ranchers to the huge collection of geodes and other gems from the area. If you travel through town, don't miss it.

Then we veered off the I10 track to go up to Alamogordo/White Sands. The National Monument is a remarkable artifact of Mother Nature. The sand is sooo white, it really looks like snow. And the plowed roads remind us of pictures of wintertime in the midwest.

It was Mothers Day, so we planned a lunch at Rebecca's at the Lodge at Cloudcroft, a (supposedly) wonderful restaurant in a small community perched at a 9000-foot highway pass between Alamogordo and Artesia. It turned out to be so wonderful that half of the surrounding coutryside had the same idea we had. The 2 1/2 hour wait reduced it's charm enough that we ended up sampling the beer at one of the local watering holes and settled for dinner back down in the valley.

The next morning, the winds were so strong that the mountain pass to Ruidosa was closed to high-profile vehicles and the trip Roswell had to be scrubbed for a safer path though El Paso and on to Pecos. Those alien burgers (those would be the "little green men" type of aliens) would have to wait till next time.