We Be Tourists! Southeast New Mexico

New Mexico is not an unknown to us.  We grew up (our first 30 years) in the panhandle of Texas, just a short four or five hour drive to Angle Fire or Taos.  We could leave home at 4:00 am and be standing at the ski lift by the time they opened.  In the summer Wheeler Peak was our favorite backpacking destination.  Park at the trail head at 9,000 ft, hike the seven miles to base camp at 11,500 ft, barf for a couple hours until the altitude sickness let up, and then do the peak the next day, topping out at 13,160 ft.

But that is all northern New Mexico.  We've squeaked out a couple of quick trips to Santa Fe and Ruidoso but didn't really get to explore outside of those towns.  Now, thirty more years later, we are back in the "neighborhood" and we are going to take advantage of it and explore a little.

This set of four days off, with cooperative weather, will give us the opportunity to explore a national park, White Sands, another NWR, Bosque del Apache and, in my opinion a national treasure, the VLA (Very Large Array).  We'll day trip to these places, probably using just two or three of our four days off.

First stop, White Sands National Monument.  It takes a about two-and-a-half hours to get there from our Roswell, NM location.  The drive is mostly on rough, narrow two-lane roads, winding through valleys and climbing small passes.  The scenery varies from desert to barren mountains, all of it gorgeous.

A few miles outside of Alamogordo, NM is White Sands NM.

These guys really really know how to do pueblo.

While the  visitor center and museum were pretty cool, we were here to be in the dunes.  So it was back in the truck and head into the dunes via the scenic drive managed by the National Park folks.  Going through this entrance gate was also the occasion for us to use our senior pass for the first time.

Yep, John reached the qualifying age for a lifetime senior pass card at the end of last year and we are finally getting to use it for a free entrance.  It's not the very first use though, on the way to New Mexico we stayed at a Corps of Engineers campground and the card got us half off of the camping fee.

We stopped a short way in and took a look back at where we came from.  The mountains in the distance is the Capitan range.  The only mountain range in the U.S. that runs East/West.  We were alongside this range for a portion of the drive between Roswell and Alamogordo.

We've been around sand dunes before but nothing this vast and nothing this white!  We had on dark, wrap-around sunglasses and were still getting "snow-blind".  It gave the camera fits too.  If the color was right the sand appeared featureless, but if you adjust to see features the sand starts to look blue.

The place is so big that there can be a lot of people without it feeling crowded.  There are picnic shelters set up in numerous places as well as back country camping.  We caught these folks doing a favorite activity when visiting the dunes, sand surfing.

I was hopeful that we would see some wildlife while in White Sands but I knew it would be a long shot.  To begin with they are predominantly very shy of human activity and then most are nocturnal.  Chances were remote we would see anything but we kept looking anyway.

Because this was a day trip there was not a lot of time to devote to any one activity.  We passed through Ruidoso at 11:00 am and stopped for an early lunch.  After all it was a Dicky's Bar B Que Pit, it's real hard to pass one of them up when they come along.  Then a few hours at White Sands and it was time to move on to the next thing, the missile museum in Alamogordo.

The Missile Museum sits high on the side of hill on the edge of Alamogordo.

Looking out over Alamogordo from the missile museum.

 We were a bit dubious at first.  We wondered aloud how anyone could make a museum about missiles be interesting.  But we were pleasantly surprised with just how fun and interesting it was.

There is an outdoor static display that you can walk up to these historic pieces and touch them.

The museum building was very tall, we presumed for displaying missiles in upright positions.  But it was not that way at all.  We arrived within an hour of closing time on a Sunday afternoon and pretty much had the place to ourselves.  The lady selling admission tickets said we would have just enough time to see the exhibits if we didn't linger too long.  The design of the museum was clever.  You took an elevator (which the inside was decorated to look like the command area of the space shuttle) to the top.  From there you were guided through the history of missiles and rocketry by following ramps down through the building.  It is very similar to the way the Tennessee Aquarium works in Chattanooga.

They locked the doors behind us as we left and we moved on to find something to eat before getting back on the road to Roswell.  On rare occasions I have posted pictures of food on this blog, usually when we were especially impressed or if something was unique.  On this day Cyndee had done an internet search for someplace with authentic New Mexican Mexican food.  Growing up where we did in Texas we are accustomed to what is commonly called Tex-Mex.  Tex-Mex is typically spicier and meatier than other styles of Mexican food.  We wanted to give the local fare a try and Cyndee's search turned up a place that got good reviews on Yelp.  We know that places can falsely pump up their ratings but generally speaking we have had good luck with the ratings.

John ordered the combo plate so that he could sample a little bit of everything they had to offer.  There were enchiladas, empaynadas and chili rellenos plus the sides of beans, rice and salad. 

The quantity of food was impressive but then the first bite changed any positive impression that may have been developing.  The grease was god-awful, and this coming from a boy raised in West Texas that didn't know food came any other way than fried until he was 20 years old!  And it wasn't just that the food was greasy, it was really old, burned grease.  It would be three days before John could get the coating of grease out of his mouth and another three days before he did not smell it with every breath he took.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some.  We'll continue our quest local Mexican food.

We'll get home well after dark on this night.  We will have to use the key code we were given to get the gate to the refuge open.  I hope we wrote it down correctly.

Tomorrow we will strike out again to see another wildlife refuge and a space science intense facility literally in the middle of nowhere.