Roswell, White Sands National Monument and Arizona

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UPDATE: I wrote this post back in early December but the internet was so slow for downloading the pictures I saved the draft and am just now getting back to it. We are in Yuma, AZ. and with any luck I will bring the blog up to date within this next week. We hope all of you had happy Holidays and are doing well this winter.

November 21st we headed north in NM to Roswell. The drive was through dry desert (Chihuahuan Desert) and more oil fields. The town of Carlsbad was really big and growing on both ends. Just north of there we saw a LAKE in the distance...we hadn't seen any bodies of water since Austin. The landscape changed again to more farm land, cattle fields with shrub brush, groves of nut trees, cotton farms and a couple of HUGE dairy farms. The cows looked pretty crowded in their pens and there were HUGE pole barns full of hay.

Roswell had a cute display along the roadside just outside of town and that got us really excited for our visit. We sent a picture to the boys with our location in case we turned up missing. LOL!! 😊. We visited the UFO museum in the center of town. It was really informative. There were displays of news stories, affidavits of people who wrote of their witness of the events of seeing a UFO and large debris fields in July of 1947. A rancher checked his land after a thunderstorm and found debris and called the local air base. Those initial people reported what was found but then were ordered to change their story to "weather balloons". The museum was started by 2 men who were told to keep quiet at the time but in the 1990s with the freedom to information act they started getting documents pertaining to the event. It is clear that something happened there but not sure what. We watched a video and a local funeral director told of getting a call from the government with embalming questions and getting a small casket. A friend of his was a military nurse and she told him abut witnessing an autopsy of an alien. The museum was playful and informative and fed our curiosity.

When we left the museum it was starting to rain. We no more that got into the RV and the skies opened up with hail, heavy rain and thunder. But, no UFO sightings😊

We headed west from there and made our way to a little town called Luisodo for the night. Leaving Roswell, the sky was the darkest we had ever seen for daylight hours due to the storm, fortunately that was in the REARview. The landscape changed again to open prairie and then rolling hills. Off in the distance we could see a very high peak and according to the map was just over 10,000 feet. Capitan Mountain. Winding through the hills we saw a distant river with land between it and the road. All the fields were surrounded by tall hardwood trees. It reminded me of driving along Route 2 in Massachusetts. This area was called Hondo Valley. We were at 6000 feet and we were hearing reports of snow expected at 9000 ft. we were happy to be getting just rain. We saw an elk in a field and also a LONG horned bull eating hay out of an iron pen. How he turned his head just right to get it in there to eat I will never know but I imagine it was quite a sight!

In Luisodo we found a campground just off the main road. It was on a ridge and in the morning we woke to ice on our steps. Mike did his run and I went out for a walk we both saw deer including a young buck and could see snow on the peaks just outside of town. When we left we saw a coating of snow just a few miles into our day. Again, we were so glad to have not had to drive in that. Mike asked, "we aren't going any further north are we?" It was so unexpected. We were just far enough up into the foothills of the NM mountains I guess. It was beautiful here it looked a lot like Maine with big pines and the mountains.

We ended up back in the desert though within a couple of hours and on a hill we could see the White Sands in the distance. That area is really big and used by the military for missile testing. A small portion of it is the National Monument which we visited. It is like something out of the movies and we learned that Hollywood uses the area for films.

From the road you see white sand dunes with vegetation. Once you get into the preserved area it all becomes white sand dunes. The sand blows so much they have to plow the road and parking lots. The sand is gypsum which is used in drywall so it packs hard. One area was all rutted and rough just like at home after a snowstorm and the streets don't get cleaned up enough before a hard freeze. People even buy saucers at the gift shop and go sliding on the dunes! We did a 2.5 mile hike along a camping loop they have for tenting. we did the entire loop barefoot. It was so soft a little damp from the rains and a little cool, but it was awesome! Mike walked it shirtless and in shorts. It was sunny and we talked about how the morning we walked in hats and gloves and now this! We ended our day by sunset in Deming, NM.

Mike had been looking for a tow vehicle for us for awhile preferably a jeep and he had seen a few in the Phoenix area so we set out in that direction. It was a long day from Deming but we made it to the east side of Phoenix by sundown to Apache Junction, AZ. Our drive took us through more desert, the mountains are changing to more rust color with some greenery, wand we saw our first saguaro cacti. We even saw a roadrunner cross the road...he was quick, didn't get a picture, beep, beep😊. We drove through an Indian reservation and the area looked so poor and unkept. We also drove through Globe and Miami AZ copper mining territory. Those towns looked nice and the mining earth work is pretty impressive. The drive from there to Apache Junction was beautiful except for the fact we came down through a pass that although was a truck route, going downhill and hitting tight corners is not fun when you are driving your house down the road.

The next day we traveled to the western part of Phoenix to look at a jeep. Still considered Phoenix and drove 70 miles! Thats like from Waterville to Portland! The jeep was 20 yrs. old but only had 18000 miles on it and looked in perfect condition. Mike drove it and we agreed to take it....until we asked the guy for a bill of sale for our registration. He said he was selling it for a friend but he was pretty shaken when we asked for that as if he didn't know how he would get it. We went into his house to get the title and I noticed he had a calendar on the wall with car shows all circled. We ended up leaving to wait for him to get the bill of sale he said he thought he could get but seeing he goes to so many shows and was vague about some of the answers to our questions, we told him no deal and moved on. We think he got it at a show and was trying to flip it and who knows the history on it. We knew it was the right decision but it was a really nice old jeep from what we could see but just couldn't take the risk. We found an RV resort and booked a week as Thanksgiving was upon us and called it a day.

Mike found us a car the next day! We bought a Chevy Sonic all set up to tow from a really nice couple who had just sold their RV and no longer needed the small car. It worked out great and our son Sam calls it the "grocery getter" 😊. We spent the week getting a temporary plate and Christmas shopping and shipping. We enjoyed the resorts hot tub and a couple of warm enough days to lay in the sun. We also went to an NFL game as the AZ Cardinals were in town. It was our first time seeing a professional football game. I think now we have seen all the major professional sports except for hockey.

Spending 8 nights in Sun City, was our longest stay since we left home in October. We were ready to move onto a new adventure but it was our first time leaving with a car and after going through the pass into Apache Junction we were a little concerned with picking our route. We wanted to explore an area on the western border of AZ along the Colorado River. We decided to take the interstate for as much of the drive as possible and that worked out well and the last 50 miles on the US route was a nice wide mostly straight and not steep road. We stayed at Buckskin Mountain State Park right on the river. And it is a narrow spot so we could easily see across to California! another RV park right on the water.

We did a hike and drove up to Lake Havasu City with the car to check it out for taking the RV up there to stay a few days. We were happy to have the car to take a scouting trip and it allowed us to take a back road over a dam there. We spent the last part of the week in Lake Havasu. It is a tourist town that really comes to life in the summer apparently. It is BOAT country. Boat shops, boats everywhere. In the 60s the town had only a few residents and a council man, engineer, bought THE London Bridge. Yes the one from England! It was originally built there as a pedestrian bridge and was starting to crumble so it was sold. It was taken apart with marking every piece and brought over to Lake Havasu and reconstructed to an island in the lake. They have a small "English" village at the base and a concrete walking path on either side along the channel. It was all decorated for Christmas and we watched a lighted boat parade. It was beautiful. We spent a day walking the bridge, taking a ferry over to the California side to a small casino (I won $190 on penny slots😊), and walked along the nice beach they have there at the State Park they have right there. Our last day we hiked a local park mountain. It climbed several peaks and we did some rock scrambling at some points and hiked along the ridge. We didn't quite make it to the highest peak as it got progressively more challenging and the room for error got pretty slim. It was a busy town with lots going on. We met 2 couples who recently retired and are spending their first winter there. They shared lots that happens there throughout the winter and in the area.

Our last night we were lucky to be there for the annual lighted boat parade for Christmas. It was so unique and beautiful!

We plan to spend more time in AZ after our time in Southern California. We are now in CA. We are visiting Joshua Tree National Park and it is amazing! Stay Tuned😊

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