Apache National Forest, AZ–Meteor Crater, AZ The roads in Arizona suck. The roads in New Mexico were quite nice; apparently NM has lots of highway money it doesn’t know what to do with, because they stick signs up everywhere. Every time you pass over a culvert, there are dozens of black and yellow striped signs warning you that, if you need to veer off the road, don’t do it right now. Every time the center line changes from broken to solid, a sign on the side of the road will warn you, “NO PASSING ZONE” or “PASS WITH CARE.” I…
Very Large Array, NM We just visited the Very Large Array Radio Telescope. It’s the array of radio dishes featured in the film Contact (which is the first movie Berck and I ever went to see together … awww). The visitor center had a little display about the making of the movie. They seemed very excited about it but were careful to point out that creative license had been taken … for instance, you don’t listen to radio telescopes with headphones, like Jodie Foster did. There’s a little walking tour that visitors like us could take, right up to one…
El Paso, TX–Lincoln National Forest, NM We spent last night in a little campground at the edge of a National Forest. It was a 12.5 mile drive off the highway to get there, the last 4 of which were gravel. The Miata can handle graded gravel roads just fine, but it doesn’t have much clearance. We often have to travel along the ridges of the ruts to keep from scraping bottom. As we entered the campground, the host emerged from his camper, which looked like it had sat in the same place for quite some time, and came to meet…
Guadalupe National Park, TX–White Sands National Park, NM We’re on our way to El Paso, having left our lovely campsite in Guadalupe National Park. Apparently, everyone else thought it was lovely too, because both nights some campers pulled in past dark, drove around the entire campground, and pitched camp right across from site. Out of a whole campground, why did they have to be so close to us? At least they were mostly interested in sleeping, so they didn’t bother us too much. We arrived at Guadalupe National Park at two in the afternoon day before yesterday. We hadn’t even…
Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM Today we visited Carlsbad Caverns. Wow! They are very cool. If you want a bigger cavern, you have to go to Borneo. We spent the morning in the city of Carlsbad. We stopped at a RV campground and paid to take showers (ahhhh!) and do laundry. The proprietor even gave us two showers for the price of one. While our clothes were drying, we went to the grocery store and bought some “cold” food. We’re camping at Guadalupe National Park, and no fires are permitted, so we can’t heat up cans of soup as we’d…