Travel to Trinity -- Day 1

The Trinity Site in New Mexico, site of the detonation of the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II,is only open to the publc twice a year.  Saturday is the date for this year, so we decided to do a road trip to New Mexico. We pulled out of the driveway in geojeep this  morning at 7:45 and headed west.  (We squeezed everything in, but it was tight.  I think even a Smart car must have more cargo space than a Wrangler.  Of course, a Smart car is not the vehicle of choice for adventures in the remote southwest.  I am glad we have the Jeep for such adventures!)

It was slow going on FM1171 at US 377 and there was a little traffic in Fort Worth, but after that we had the road almost to ourselves.  What a pleasant change from so much of the driving last month back and forth to Ohio.  We took the interstate to just west of Sweetwater, then US 84 north to US 380.  Tonight we are in Roswell, New Mexico.

We did not take any pictures, but were blown away by the hundreds of windmills (I guess the correct term is 'wind turbines') along US 84 north of Sweetwater.  We had seen them along I-20, but had no idea there were so many more in other locations in the area.  I guess they have to be somewhere, since Texas is the largest producer of electricity from windmills of any state in the country.  I also found them less visually annoying out in these wide open spaces than crowded together in some of the passes in Southern California, but that is probably just me.

Roswell is, of course, the center of all things related to aliens.  Driving around town (and, surprisingly Roswell is much larger than we had expected) it seems that every business has their own alien standing somewhere or a welcome sign on the marquee for aliens.  Even our motel had its own alien standing in the lobby.  The UFO museum was closed by the time we stopped after dinner, but the gift shop across the street was happy to sell us a little green alien Gumby. (The Frog is now happy. :) )

Alien Gumby

We did see a very interesting display at the convention center of Henry Goddard's actual rocket launching tower that he used while launching rockets in Roswell.  Roswell is also home to the New Mexico Military Institute, which is a state-supported 4-year prep school and 2-year junior college. It has a beautiful campus and claims some really impressive alums, including Norman Brinker, Sam Donaldson, and Roger Staubach.  Who knew??  Not bad for a day expected to be only devoted to getting from Point A to Point B.

On the Road Again

This is just a quick post from Laredo, TX. We left Sunday morning at 8:45, planning to stop in San Antonio. However, we were avoiding pop-up showers and the threat of rain, so decided to press through to Laredo since the traffic was not bad. We got to see lots and lots of wild flowers...bluebonnets and fields of yellow plants. Further south there mixtures of many colors.

Arrived here about 4. We grabbed a room at the Holiday Inn, after some wandering around the mall and other areas. Grabbed dinner at Chili's, then we drove around the downtown square near the La Posada Hotel. It is amazing how small some of the homes are. One of the most interesting things was the old fort, which is now the Laredo Community College. The historic buildings are in use by the college. However, my greatest first impression so far--the laid back style of driving and the very slooooow traffic lights.

Now to push "post". This is my first attempt at making a post from my iPad.

The Stars at Night are Big and Bright

I am not sure that it counts as "Deep in the Heart of Texas" when we were nearly on the Oklahoma border, but the skies were glorious both nights during our stay this past weekend  at Lake Arrowhead State Park southeast of Wichita Falls.  It is actually one of the few state parks in the area we had never visited.  (It had no geocaches until relatively recently.)

We left early on Friday afternoon in Silver.  We pulled out of the RV storage area at 4:30 and were registered and hooked up in the campsite by 7:15 despite the very slow Friday afternoon traffic between Lewisville and Denton and some exploring of the park in order to pick our campsite.  We had hoped to make it by then, since 7:15 was sunset.  Gotta love daylight savings time!

I had started a batch of beef stew in the thermal cooker earlier in the day, so dinner was ready with no further preparation.  The inner pot went into the outer pot at 2:30:  the inner pot was still too hot to touch without a hotpad when we sat down to dinner at 7:30, with the meat fork tender and falling apart.

After cleaning up from dinner we went outside to enjoy the gloriously beautiful evening and were overcome with all of the stars.  It was one of the darkest parks we had ever been in...no street lights and no light pollution from nearby cities. That coupled with the unusually low humidity and no moon made for a stunningly full star field.  There were so many stars that it was nearly impossible to pick out the constellations. We could not decide which was the pole star, but we could easily see the Milky War.  Go figure! 

We spent the next day and a half exploring the park on bike and on foot.  That included a swing by the still active oil well in the park (dates back to 1952!), a trip to the lake shore, some time watching the prairie dogs (supposedly one of the eastern most prairie dog colonies),

 scaring up about a million grasshoppers while walking the trails, checking out the disc golf course (overflowing with local college kids in the midst of a tournament on Saturday morning), being eyed cautiously by a very large and noisy hawk, and finding seven geocaches in the park. We did not know until logging after we returned home that we had hit 1200 caches with our last cache on Saturday and were part of a world wide 10-10-10 celebration of geocaching by finding a cache on Sunday, October 10. Of course, the best part of the weekend was probably the weather.  It was a bit warm during the day (high in the mid to high 80's), but lows at night in the mid to high 50's. 

By Sunday morning the park was rapidly becoming deserted.  We had an early lunch and then hit the road about noon.  We made it home by 2:30, including stopping to fill up with gas and transferring everything from Silver to the car for the trip home.  Two nights camping: $30, including the $10 discount and our prepaid annual State Park Pass; refilling Silver's gas tank: $100; a weekend away to a slower pace and some outdoor time: priceless.