{"id":457,"date":"2019-04-26T01:58:12","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T01:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/our2019journey.com\/?p=457"},"modified":"2019-06-09T23:23:42","modified_gmt":"2019-06-09T23:23:42","slug":"week-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/?p=457","title":{"rendered":"Week 11"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It was a short drive across the border from Guadalupe Mountains NP to our next stop, Carlsbad Caverns. Gareth has always been fascinated by caves and caverns so this had been on his list for a long time. It did not disappoint and was very impressive. The only downside was the number of visitors being on a Saturday of the Easter Weekend and also the first day of \u201cNational Park Week\u201d so there was no charge for admission for all National Parks in the entire country that date.
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Bye Bye sunlight for a few hours..<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Hard to grasp the enormity of the cave from a picture (also the lighting inside made taking photos tricky)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“The Lion’s Tail”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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After a couple stops in the town of Carlsbad to get groceries, do laundry, and stock up on pet food we ended up at Brantley Lake State Park about 10 miles north of town. We enjoyed walking down to the lake and watching the sunset. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Misty being extra cuddly while watching the sunset<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We talked to some people in the park who suggested we take a different route to our next stop that would take us through Roswell, which sounded interesting to us given the tale of aliens landing here. Sure enough the town had lots of \u201caliens\u201d in different forms – statues, murals etc. We stopped for an hour to visit the \u201cUFO Museum” where they had all sorts of \u201cevidence\u201d related to the infamous 1947 landing just North of town.
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Misty was very curious about this exhibit…kept jumping up trying to get a view!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From there we headed West across some beautiful terrain and into the mountains, stopping next in a small ski village called Ruidoso. There were lots of touristic shops to look around, but we mainly window shopped other than to stop in at a beer garden for some refreshment before heading on. We descended a couple thousand feet to the valley floor and drove a short distance to the town of Almagordo.
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View from our campsite<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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We had initially planned to visit the White Sands National Park the next morning but opted to postpone a day to give us time to get some other stuff done. Instead we took the motorcycle out around lunch time up another mountain road to the town of Cloudcroft, and from there down to the National Solar Observatory. It was a nice twisty mountain road, but the temperature was quite cool, in the low teens. As we descended we saw lightning to the West and some dark clouds rolling in. Minutes after we got back to the RV the rain started to pour down, so it would seem our timing was good.
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Solar observatory from the 1960’s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View from Solar observatory in the mountains. The White Sands National Monument park can be seen in the distance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The next morning we packed up and headed to White Sands. We had read online that it was a good place to take dogs as they enjoyed the gypsum sands. Sure enough Misty had a good time frollicking in the dunes and joining us for a bicycle ride. We stayed until just after lunch before moving on, stopping in Las Cruces NM for Misty to get her coat trimmed. Our stop for the night was just outside the mountain town of Silver City NM.
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…and within a few minutes of arriving at the park Gareth drove a little too close to a sand dune in the parking lot and got the RV stuck. You can see the evidence of our efforts of pulling sand away from the tires. Fortunately there was another tourist in the parking lot who had a plank of wood to help give our wheel traction<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Decided after getting stuck and driving over a bumpy road that it would be faster (and safer) to travel the loop road by bicycle. We put the dog in the dog backpack and rode on..<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Misty is very sedate in her backpack and doesn’t try to escape. The entire time she’s looking left to right checking out the scenery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Interesting to see what grows in this climate! Also this sand is made of gypsum that’s been slowly broken down from rocks into powder (same material as drywall)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Last photos of Misty before she had her hair cut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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One of the animals that has adapted to live in the dunes. Its ability to blend in allows it to hide from predators<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Went tobogganing down the dunes \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our reason for visiting Silver City was its proximity to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. We left around noon on the motorcycle and headed off on the twisty mountain road to the monument. It was quite a slow ride and took us about an hour and a half to get there, and we had not a lot of time to spare to hike up to the dwellings. The ride back was just as scenic through some beutiful forests.
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700 year old cliff dwellings<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The next morning we packed up and continued West across the border into Arizona, with Chiricahua National Monument as our goal. We arrived in the early afternoon and set up camp. The next morning we took the \u201chiker shuttle\u201d to the top of the park road and began our descent. It took us about 5 and a half hours but we saw lots of fantastic rock formations, sometimes called hoodoos. The heat and sun were intense so we were extremely tired when we got back to camp.
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Little mini dust tornadoes were seen along the highway<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“Chira-cow-a”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Relative of the Blue Jay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View from the start of our hike<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Cool looking lizards<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Balanced rock (no help from Sandy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View from Inspiration Point<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“Big Balanced Rock”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Really cool looking rock formations formed from a volcanic eruption millions of years ago that was 100 times stronger than Mount St Helens and left ash deposits up to 2,000ft high. The Ice Age helped to dissolve the ash and leave behind the formations<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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It was a short drive across the border from Guadalupe Mountains NP to our next stop, Carlsbad Caverns. Gareth has … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/week11.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRHnz-7n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":510,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/our2019journey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}