Texas & New Mexico

We grabbed our rental car in Tucson; a nice free upgrade to a full-sized Hyundai Sonata which gets a budget happy 33-35 mpg. The 75mph speed limits on the US interstate systems get you places quickly and our first stop was White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), New Mexico. This is where the American missile program began. 300 train cars of captured V-2 equipment made its way to White Sands after WWII. We've all heard the expression “It's not rocket science”; about only two thirds of the V-2 launches were considered successful. It is tricky getting it right; one of the V-2's went off in the wrong direction and crashed outside of Mexico City. A month later the Roswell incident (UFO recovery) occurred a 150 miles away. And guess what? The Air Force was sending monkeys up in the air. The Roswell incident involved a sighting of a being that was “not human”. Hmmmmm.... The WSMR museum features an outside collection of decommissioned missiles and the opportunity to pass through an official checkpoint (no photographs) and see the missiles that “kept the world safe”.

Further down the road, the White Sands National Monument provided us with a scaled down version of the Namib desert dunes. The sand is unusually white (gypsum, the same stuff in drywall) and with about 5,000 African oryx (or gut clearing”gemsbok”) running around Southern New Mexico, you might think you are on another continent.

Carlsbad Caverns lived up to their World Heritage Site Status. There is an old-fashion way to enter the caves, through the natural entrance, or by an elevator that whisks you down 850 feet to the main chamber. The big hall is something like 16 American football fields in area and the drops the jaws of jaded cave goers.

Just around the the corner, across the state line into Texas rise the Guadalupe Mountains, a huge exposed fossilized reef. It is also home to the highest point in Texas. The 8,751 feet high peak felt very alpine in 50 mph winds. More interestingly, there once was a Butterfield Overland Mail Station below the mountains. The company operated a twice-weekly stage coach service from St. Louis to San Fransisco in the late 1850's that took less than 25 days to travel the 2800 miles. John Butterfield founded companies that later became American Express and Wells Fargo. The stagecoach service was later replaced by the Pony Express and then by the telegraph in the late 1860's. Passenger fare for the bone-jarring journey was $200 or over $4,000 in today's dollars.

Big Bend National Park is at the northern end of the Chihuahan Desert, along the Rio Grande River,bordering Mexico. On our first night in the park, we camped at the Cottonwood campground with a few other campers near the river. We half expected to have migrant workers stream through, helicopters to buzz our tent, mariachi bands and a few chihuahua dogs thrown in for good measure. Wrong, the desert and lack of roads creates a natural migrant barrier. Instead, we had howling coyote, snorting javelina (bush pig) and a horned owl above our tent that screeched all night long. So much for solitude. Big Bend was sweet; plenty of desert vegetation, plenty of rocks, canyons, the river, hot springs, wildlife and blue skies without the crowds. It is hard to beat, but it does take on a cartoonist bent with Wiley coyote, plenty of bunnies, daffy ducks, piggies, roadrunners....

We spent a night at more sand dunes (Monahan's dune hills) and took cover inside our full-sized car while a Sahara-like sand storm blew through the camp. Little did we know, but the best was still too come.....in Midland Texas

We always thought Odessa was on the Black Sea but it turns out to be in the middle of a vast Texas oilfield near Midland. Odessa is not just a football mad town but it also features a replica of Stonehenge (vertically challenged). If you squint when you look through the rocks, you'll see a Home Depot and a Pizza Hut behind it. But as they say, if you put up anything other than a pump-jack in Odessa, you are increasing the local culture. With so many friendly people, the Texan drawl and 80 mph speed limits, we thought there is plenty of culture in Texas.

A this stage, the reader will likely think, Midland, did you mention Midland, isn't that where George W. once lived? Yes, you can visit the G.W. Bush childhood home in Midland, Texas. It is a very neat, modest suburban house that has been beautifully restored and it represents an instant step back into the 1950's. A very nice woman gave us a tour and after wards an envelope to make further donations to the foundation and a wallet sized card with Roy Rogers' Riders' Rules (a list of ten rules the actor encouraged his young fans to live by). The foundation is raising $5 million to build a new visitor's center. You can follow the foundation on Twitter or Facebook. A failed presidency? They don't think so in Midland, Texas.

We kept our seat belts on tight and headed onto Roswell, New Mexico for an alien abduction, but it just didn't happen. There were no little green men on the main street and the UFO museum was pretty lame. But we did learn that John Denver was born in Roswell. But with 25,000 sandhill cranes and herds of pronghorn antelope nearby, we figured the real action was out of town (we later discovered the airport is used as an aircraft bone-yard). We visited Lincoln, New Mexico, where back in 1878, it was considered to be the most dangerous place in the USA. Billy the Kid, sentenced to hang, broke out of the Lincoln jail and was tracked down and shot dead by the Lincoln county sheriff (Pat Garrett). Nowadays, Lincoln and the nearby village of Capitan are pretty sleepy places. Capitan is the birthplace (in the nearby forest) and the burial site of Smoky Bear. Smoky was a tiny, badly burned bear, rescued from a fire who became the living symbol of the Forest Service mascot. He lived for 26 years in the national zoo, Washington DC and gained official civil servant retired status before his death. Further west on Highway 380, we passed just north of Trinity, site of the first test of an atomic weapon. The site was bulldozed in 1952 but for those interested in atomic tourism, it is open to the public two days a year.

Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico was our next stop before returning to Tucson. It is home to about 100,000 snowbirds each winter including huge populations of snow geese and sandhill cranes. Our visit coincided with the festival of the cranes and we found ourselves bumping along in the pre-dawn sub-freezing temperatures in the back of a chartered school bus. We stood amongst birders in the blackness, trying to stay warm, awaiting the stunning daily take-off of snow geese. The birds are onto a good gig; crops are grown for the benefit of the birds under cooperative agreements with local farmers. Next time someone calls you a “bird brain”, you should be flattered!