Almost home

The last wildlife we will see is Texas wildlife. Here are the horses on Tom's place. They are so beautiful and look so peaceful grazing.

The drive into Texas was uneventful as you might imagine if you've ever driven through West Texas. It is flat, brown and nothing to break the monotony of the terrain except anticipation of a visit with the Bristow family.

Mindy LOVED Tom's place! She ran and ran! She was free! We were worried a couple of times that she might be lost because she was running so far away...out of sight. But after a while she would come running in with a big smile on her face (yes, dogs can smile!)

We had a wonderful visit with Tom and Henrietta. Luckily, Laura was off Tuesday and Wednesday so was able to spend time with us. Matt was off Wednesday too so we had a rousing game of Hand and Foot in the afternoon. It was so good to be with family again.

Addie was adorable, as usual and kept us entertained.

Today we will drive on to Meridian and visit with Bill's aunt and cousin. We haven't seen them since Wyatt's wedding three years ago. We are really looking forward to visiting with them tomorrow. Then HOME!! Sleeping in our own bed again...showering in our own shower...cooking in my new kitchen again AND seeing our kids and grandkids! Life is good!

This has been the best trip of our lives and we have done some amazing things and seen how spectacular our country is. Thanks for sharing our first RV adventure with us.

Carlsbad and beyond

Carlsbad was really wonderful. It was much more developed and commercialized than I remembered but Bill assured me that it is normal after 50 years for things to change. Thanks, I needed that! Anyway, there were now 6 different tours you could take. Three guided tours that were all sold out or three self-guided tours. We elected to take the lower tour where you take the elevator down 800 feet and tour down there and then take the elevator back up. Otherwise you could walk the tour that descended 800 feet in about a mile. Either one would be beautiful but the easier one sounded better for our tired old bones!

This picture is "the Lion's tail". It is a natural formation that gets bigger at the bottom. Really nice.

This formation is a huge column that is shown in most pictures of Carlsbad. It is huge! The light in these pictures is without a flash. I hate to use a flash when it bothers everyone around you trying to enjoy the wonderful sights with the lights they have artfully placed. Sadly, not everyone shared my view and several flashes from other cameras blinded us for short periods.

These formations are called draperies. They are so graceful and hang in folds just like fabric but they are translucent, white and with the lights behind them almost glow. These are my favorites.

I said that Carlsbad is much like Cathedral Caverns outside Huntsville but 10 times bigger. Now I realize that 100 times bigger is more like it. It's a wonder I have any breath left after so many breath-taking things we have seen in the last couple of months. I am a little sad to see then end of this trip but at the same time am getting anxious to be home.

I couldn't leave New Mexico without eating a Lotaburger!! I remember those from when I was a kid in Albuquerque. I programmed Lottaburger into the GPS and came up blank so I figured that it was gone like so many other things there. Notice the difference in spelling? Well, on the highway in Carlsbad there it was! It was close to dinner time (well, it was close enough!) so we had a Lotaburger after all and it was as good as I remembered! Life is good!

We drove to Abilene today, not on the interstate. As we neared the end of our drive on 180 we came upon mile after mile of beautiful windmills. I took many pictures from the moving motor home so they aren't the best pictures. Try clicking on the picture to see it bigger. Last summer Clem was working on these very windmills! Wow. I saw them through different perspective thinking of him on top of one. Very cool.

Tomorrow we will get to Ferris to visit Tom and his family for a couple of days. Family time!! I'm looking forward to that!

Aliens

Today we drove from Albuquerque to Roswell and then on to Carlsbad. It was a nostalgic drive for us because we drove this route many times while Tom was a student at NMMI. Clines Corners is where you turn toward Vaughn and the road from Vaughn to Roswell is long, straight and boring! There is absolutely nothing to see and the road is absolutely straight. When I was in high school and Tom was a cadet I would load the car with girls and go to the dances in Roswell. It made Tom and me both very popular! Him because I brought dates for his friends and me because the dances were nice and Tom provided dates for all my friends.

This GPS scene stayed the same for miles and miles! No turns, to houses or towns and not many cows to see. So while I have this picture with not much to say about it I will tell you that Bill and I spent our honeymoon in Roswell and even went to a dance the night we got married. Then the next day we went back to Albuquerque and he went back to work (he was a PFC in the Army stationed at Sandia Base). Those were the days, my friend!

I thought you may not believe the GPS so I took this picture out the front window. See? Nothing to see! The only thing to break the pattern were the three trains that were going by so I took a picture of that. It is always pretty to see the LONG trains on the flat mesa.

Here's the train. Move on down the page and you will see the UFO Museum. It was pretty cool. All new since we used to go to Roswell. Back in the 60's nobody talked about the UFOs or mentioned them at all. I thought maybe it was too soon after the event but Clem said they just hadn't figured out that they could make a buck from it yet. He's probably right.

This is a building at the New Mexico Military Institute. I put it in for Tom. He will remember it. NMMI has grown (hasn't everything!) It is still a beautiful place.

Okay, I skipped to the good stuff. Here is photographic evidence of UFOs. The museum has lots of pictures and newspaper articles and hand written statements from people who have been abducted. It even has a wall dedicated to removing alien implants people have turned up with. I took lots more pictures but I will only put a couple here. You get the idea.

This little guy was the last thing we saw. They don't pretend it's real but it is kinda cute.

Tomorrow we will tour the caverns and go to a park close by. I'll have lots of pictures of those.

We are getting closer to home and home is sounding really good to me.

Albuquerque

It's been very strange to be back in Albuquerque and see the differences that have occurred since I was here last. It's been a long time but still I wasn't prepared for so many of my favorite places to be gone...not just changed but gone! I went to high school here and a bit of college at UNM. Both schools are still here but vastly changed. Bill and I met at a drug store where I worked and it is gone. Our first apartment is gone, I mean the whole building is gone. The hospital where Clem was born is gone. Sandia Base has been taken over by Kirtland Air Force Base and so many of the old buildings have been erased and new ones built in their place. I knew it wouldn't be the same but still it is strange to see that so many things are just gone.

The picture above is a petroglyph. There is a whole park devoted to the many petroglyphs that have been found and now are part of a national monument on the northwest end of town. We lived here for years and never heard a word about petroglyphs! Anyway, it is interesting to see and we spent some time in the park.

This is Sandia Mountain as viewed from across town. It is still beautiful! They didn't change the mountain, by golly! When I was a kid it was what anchored me. We lived just at the base of the mountain so if I headed toward the mountain I knew I would get home! I have no sense of direction so it was helpful to me.

When we went up on the mountain Mindy finally found some wildlife that she could chase. It was a squirrel and she had a great time barking and chasing it up the tree. What a hunter!

This is the sign at the entrance to our rv park. It is so typically New Mexican that I loved it. The sun symbol is what I expected to be on the welcome sign at the border but instead there was a string of chili peppers. What? This is what should be on the welcome sign.

The sign leading to Sandia Crest is really classy. The cut metal signs are so popular in the west and we have seen some really nice ones at ranch entrances. The ram in this sign is beautiful but I don't think there are any big horn sheep in the whole state. It's pretty anyway.

We went searching for a couple of ghost towns that we used to go to many years ago. Even that has changed. Golden, which was an old mining ghost town with quite a few old houses and stores now has new houses and residents! Madrid, which used to have a few people but was mostly a ghost town, is now a bustling tourist trap. Lots of artsy crafty stores and taverns. Very cool.

It has been interesting to see Albuquerque. It's a wonderful city but has no resemblance to my old hometown. I guess I couldn't expect it to stay the same...I didn't.

Oops!

Okay. It hasn't been our best day. We pulled in to get gas just fine. When we pulled out there was a cement barrier that caught on the back, bottom door and bent it out. We managed to get free and pulled around back to assess the damage. We were able to remove the door and secure everything inside that compartment and be on our way. We will worry about getting the door fixed later (maybe in Dallas or even wait till we get home).

The mountains changed so much in a few miles and we saw all these "almost" caves! The rock was almost white which was such a change from the reds and yellows we have seen lately. It was beautiful and I began to get excited about being back in New Mexico! It's been years since I was here and I am anxious to see some of our old haunts.

Oh, shoot. I see that I reversed the pictures but I don't want to take the time to fix that. See below where we successfully entered New Mexico. The sign was different than I was expecting but still nice. When we came to the welcome center it was closed! No NM information or welcome from a nice worker to welcome us back to our old stomping grounds! Oh well. We stopped in Gallup and will go into Albuquerque early tomorrow. It will still be good to see it again.

Interesting day. Everything is fine and LIFE IS GOOD!

Oops! I deleted the New Mexico sign. I won't fix that either. It's been a long day and I am going to sit still until time for bed and let tomorrow be a better day.

Car Show on Route 66

This is just a small sample of the awesome cars we saw at the car show. I put more Fords on than others for Buddy. There were several for sale, even a beautifully restored old Mustang that I will buy for him when we win the lottery (it has to be the really BIG lottery, though). It was nice. Mindy and Bill made friends up and down the street while I snapped pictures.

Have you heard that Obabama will be here tomorrow to see the Grand Canyon? We are leaving in the morning, hopefully before he gets here with all the traffic tie-ups that will cause! Albuquerque will be our next main stop but it may take us a couple of days to get there. Looking forward to seeing our old stomping grounds!

We got the time zone right but nobody told us that Arizona doesn't go on daylight saving time so we arrived an hour early for the play. Poor Mindy got dropped off at doggy day care early too. Anyway the little production was cute with cowboys and horses and cap guns. Then we all boarded the train for our 2 1/4 hour ride to the Grand Canyon. We opted for the luxury car with continental breakfast. It was really nice and we met some great people and had a nice time riding on the train.

What can I say about the Grand Canyon? It is spectacular! I've seen it in pictures but still couldn't imagine how breathtaking it really is. The ride here on the train was flat and even though we were climbing to higher elevation you couldn't tell it by looking. What must the early settlers have thought when they came to this HUGE canyon with little warning that it was there. I can't imagine.

We asked another tourist to take our picture and here it is. I didn't know my hair was blowing so bad or I would have fixed it or borrowed Bill's hat but anyway here is proof that we stood in this amazing place.

This is a picture of the whole train as it went into a turn. I am standing out on the back deck leaning out to take this picture! It was such a beautiful sight that I didn't even think about the perils of falling overboard!

Oh no!! The train is being robbed! We saw the robbers riding by on horses to rob the train! The train stopped to let them on! Jack (the guy who took care of us on the train) said that the union won't allow the cowboys to jump from a horse onto a moving train so they now have to stop the train to let them on. I thought this was funny! Anyway they walked through the whole train and people gave them money (you didn't have to but who is going to NOT give them a dollar or two?) It was a fabulous day! We were all exhausted and fell into bed early. Woke this morning to BIG wind. Glad we aren't leaving till tomorrow.