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Published: April 5th 2022
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We didn't tour around Tucson, having seen most of the sights on previous trips, and just enjoyed time with Mary and her family.
Mary's three daughters, son-in-law, and grandson, and grand dogs all came over on Sunday afternoon, and it was so good to see them again. All the girls live in Tucson, and one lives just up the street from Mary. Mary's neighborhood is quiet and peaceful with little traffic. Right across the street is a green space belonging to Pima Community College, with great walking and running trails, which I used each morning. Her pool is beautiful, but cold this time of year (it gets cool at night but into the high 80s during the day) which was fine with me, but not so enticing for Bill. He did get in once...
After a relaxing weekend at Mary's lovely house, we packed up and headed out towards New Mexico.
Once again we were on a truck route for the first part of the day, but the roads were fairly empty by the afternoon. We crossed several immense basins with stern warnings about potential sandstorms with ZERO visibility. Signs gave you precise instructions about what to do,
but it sounds quite frightening. This was the most desolate part of our trip so...mostly scrub, and few trees or cactus. There was an area of rock formations (Texas Canyon) that were amazing. "The mountains formed
during the Cordilleran Uplift in Mesozoic time, approximately 65 million to 150 million years ago. The Dragoons stand as an eroded remnant of long ago volcanic activity, the rock formations consisting of highly weathered granite and basalt."
At the edge of the mountains, we saw wind turbines and solar arrays. We guessed they couldn't be out in the plains because of the sand storms?
We stopped for the night in Elephant Butte, just north of Truth or Consequences. Our hotel/spa/restaurant was recently quite popular and charming. Between covid and the drought that has caused the water in the nearby reservoir to mostly disappear (this was a water sport center), it has fallen on hard times. The rooms are clean, it's quiet (or it was until a few minutes ago, when some ranchers and their dogs showed up. Our door was open and the dogs came in and were not at all friendly. When I asked if they could keep the dogs out
of our room, one rancher said he'd try, but they were "ranch dogs" after all.). The grounds are unkempt, and everything is closed except maybe a dozen rooms. Their website wasn't updated to reflect any of this...
We went to the state park nearby, located on the shores of the Elephant Butte Reservoir, so I could swim. The reservoir is very low, but in 1915 when it was filled by damming the Rio Grande River, it was the largest manmade lake in the world! It will probably never be full again, due to climate change.
We had a good dinner at a local mexican restaurant. El Faro. Most of the restaurants listed in tripadvisor are closed. This a sad place, and this double whammy of climate change and covid has hit small towns all over the world.
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