Welcome to New Mexico (Again)

We left Brantley Lake State Park this morning and headed away from Carlsbad Caverns and on to new adventures. Visiting the cavern and going on the four tours left us thinking that someday we'd like to come back and do some of the other tours (though maybe not the one that requires crawling through tight passages ....

We're on our way to the Phoenix area to spend a week, with two overnight stops along the way. Tonight we're at the New Mexico Tourist Welcome Center in Anthony, NM, just west of El Paso. Hey, you might be thinking, weren't they just in New Mexico at the cavern??? Yes, but the route from Carlsbad to Phoenix dips south to El Paso to go around the Guadalupe Mountains.

On the way we stopped at the visitor center for the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. This is a lesser known national park, and its secrets are mainly available to hardy hikers. We watched an interesting orientation slide show that explained the geology of the mountains. The mountains preserve the remains of a Permian reef, built up around a shallow inland sea--the same reef that is responsible for the Carlsbad Caverns.

Driving through the mountains made our fuel economy plummet, and it wasn't any better when we hit move level land, because high winds buffeted us, often headwinds. We were driving through areas where signs warned "Zero visibility possible," and the wind was definitely kicking up the dust. We were afraid we'd be enveloped in a dust storm like the one we ran into last year.

That didn't happen, but when we stopped in a gas station parking lot to go back to Venture to eat lunch, we were hit by such strong wind gusts that we could hardly stand. We got back into the truck and drove on.

Roadrunner hurrying on its way

Spacious parking area with stuccoed picnic shelters and mountains in the background--and free coffee in the morning!

We found the Welcome Center in the Day's End listings, which have been very valuable to us. On our arrival, when we opened Venture's door, we were greeted with an unwelcome sight: our spice drawer had fallen out and dumped spice containers and spices everywhere. Mostly this was just an inconvenience, but we really had difficulty getting a couple of spice bottles out from under our big slide where they had rolled and gotten stuck. On the brighter side, the spice drawer got cleaned and rearranged!