Our Nest on Wheels

No, this post is not a commentary on Wheaton/Winfield, where we used to live. It's about our visit to White Sands National Monument.

In a previous post, I (Steve) wrote about the gorgeous white sand beaches of the Florida panhandle. Of all the places we visited in Florida this past winter, the panhandle beaches are our favorites. We think that they are likely the nicest beaches in the world, and others have confirmed that view, not that we've visited all the beaches in the world, but we can work on that.

On an earlier family vacation, we visited Great Sand Dunes National Park (I think at the time we were there it was a National Monument), and we were amazed at how you can get such a huge pile of beach sand in the middle of the Colorado mountains. Well, if you combine the white sands of the Florida beaches with the the idea of a huge area of sand dunes in the mountains you get White Sands National Monument. This is the world's largest gypsum dunefield. But rather than call it gypsum, it's easier to think of it as baby powder, because that's what it looks like a feels like when you walk in it. Amazingly (at least amazing to a couple of kids who grew up burning the bottoms of their feet on Lake Michigan beaches), this sand doesn't get hot!

It's hard to get good pictures of the sand dunes and their vastness. Because they are such a brilliant white, all the contrast that shows shapes gets lost. There is a surprising amount of wildlife that lives in the dunes, some of it specifically adapted to blend in, like this lizard:

Human wildlife can stay in the dunes too. You can get a permit to camp in the dunes.  It didn't really hold any appeal for us, as you're not really very far from the road, and you don't really get to see anything different. But during a full moon I would guess that even in the middle of the night it's about as light as daytime with all the white sand reflecting the moonlight.

We went to White Sands from Las Cruces as we were staying in Las Cruces and it's only about 50 miles away. We did not realize that there is a border control checkpoint just a few miles before you get to White Sands. Jane was not carrying her driver's license, and neither of us had our passports, so without proper identification, we ran the risk of being searched and detained. (As an aside, I've discovered that almost all of our travels in 2016 and 2017 have been in the 100-mile-wide "no man's land" along our country's border, where your constitutional protections from arbitrary search and seizure do not apply. I wasn't really aware of this until recently, but you can read more here if you're interested.) But apparently we look white enough not to be stopped, while the Hispanic-looking man ahead of us was asked to pull to the side for a search. 

A more likely thing to disrupt your travel to White Sands is missile testing. The road ffrom Las Cruces runs through the White Sands Missile Range, home to a US Army and Air Force base and the site of many significant tests, including the Trinity nuclear test site (1944), Nike missile test launches, Partriot missile tests, and the V2 launching site. After World War II, we brought all the German V2 rockets we could find to New Mexico for study. I think we also brought most of the captured German scientists who developed them. Rather than send these guys to prison for their role in developing the weapons that rained down on London, we sent them to the New Mexico desert. Pretty much even, I think.

I got to visit the missile museum while Jane did not as she had forgotten her ID at home, and did not look enough like a German scientist.

. . . and some seem to be rather crude. But they're all part of American history. 

In an earlier post, I (Steve) mentioned skipping over all of Texas. Well, we did pretty much hustle across Texas.  It's a wide state, at around 900 miles on Interstate-10. We stopped in Houston, San Antonio, and Fort Stockton. For most people, Fort Stockton is an overnight stop that's halfway between a couple of other places that you'd rather be. So most people stay one night, and given that it's west Texas, who can blame them?  We tend to stay at least two nights in any place, as that way we don't feel rushed. In Fort Stockton, that made us long-term residents.  But it was still just a stopover for us going from San Antonio to Carlsbad, NM.

Neither one of us had ever been to Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. I guess it was never on the way to any of the places that we were headed on vacation, nor worthy of being a destination all on its own. Since we were crossing Texas and going on to Arizona, this seemed like the perfect time to stop and see it. And we are glad that we did. But this part of the country is pretty bleak. You can see why people hustle across it. There isn't much in the way of nice parks to stay at near Carlsbad, so we stayed at Brantley Lake State Park. Here's a view of the lake from our site.

It wasn't bad, just not what we think of when we think of a park on a lake. But it was reasonably close (30 miles or so) to Carlsbad Caverns, so it made for a decent location for four nights. [Jane's note: Not so decent, however, that the rodents want to stay there. At least one set up (mercifully temporary) residence in our coach.]

The Caverns are located underground, so it's nice and cool down there--something like 55 degrees, which feels really good after the west Texas heat. You enter through the same cave opening that the bats use at night, and descend a series of switchbacks into the cave.

The cavern is huge. It just goes and goes, and you walk and walk and walk, all the while seeing amazing formations and huge rooms. As you can imagine, it's pretty hard to get good pictures in a cave, as they don't tend to be well lit, and it's really difficult to get any kind of size perspective. I took a lot of pics, but mostly they will serve to help us remember what we saw. I'll include a couple here to give you a bit of an idea.

At the end of your trip through the caverns, you are over 1,000 feet underground, but fortunately there is an elevator that takes you to the surface. If the elevator isn't working, due to wind, or maintenance issues, or power problems, then you just have to walk back out the way you came in. We were glad that the elevator was working, as it's a really long walk.

The other part of today's post involves another long walk: up Guadalupe Peak. Guadalupe Peak is the highest spot in Texas and is located in Guadalupe National Park. As it's just down the road from Carlsbad Caverns, you may as well visit both when you are in the area.

Guadalupe peak is 8,749 feet in elevation. So not really a tall mountain, by Rocky Mountain standards, but significantly higher than all the surrounding area, and it makes for a nice hike. The hike to the top is a fairly easy walk, but it does rise 3,000 vertical feet and is about four miles one-way. Along the way there are a few sections with significant exposure (places where you can fall a long way), but nothing technical.

At some point in our marriage, I had agreed to take Jane to the top of a mountain sometime. We had wanted to climb Mount Whitney in California when we lived there, but it just didn't work out. We also decided that the "mountains" in Acadia didn't count, as they are under 1,000 feet. But this one qualifies, I think. It's a little odd in that in addition to the normal summit survey marker, there's this metal pyramid monument. It's a monument to the pioneers who came this way, and it's brought to you by American Airlines!

The summit register is kept in an old ammo box, and here is Jane signing her first summit register.

Overall, we enjoyed Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Peak. Each one makes for an enjoyable day and the two parks are very different from each other. And they break up the monotony of crossing Texas, and makes for a nice stop before you get to Las Cruces, which I'll write about next.

~ Steve

Today the granddaughter of one of my best friends was baptized in our church in Wheaton. I wasn't there.

It's one of those "another Sunday; another church" weekends that are part of the nomadic life. I'm not complaining; we chose this life and we anticipated this challenge. In the last 11 months, we've worshiped in about 35 churches. Some were friendly; others not so much. In some the singing was robust; in others, the accompanist couldn't count. A lot of congregations were small and aging. Some of the preachers were terrific orators, some were soporific, but only a few sermons were not soundly biblical. We've been in churches where we slipped effortlessly into the flow of the service and a few (I'm looking at you, Episcopalians) where we could have used a tour guide to keep up with which book we needed to be in for which part of the liturgy. 

Today was a "good" Sunday: friendly people, comfortable-to-us liturgy, gifted preacher, accomplished organist, full pews.

Better than all of that, though, is something that runs like a thread through all the churches we have visited: this church, like all the others, is a part of the Church with a capital C--the universal Body of Christ, what those of us who say the Apostles' Creed know as "the holy, catholic Church; the communion of saints." (For those who aren't fluent in church-speak, "saints" in this context doesn't mean really good people or beatified people--just people who belong to Jesus Christ. If you're interested, you can read more here and here.)

And here's what was so beautiful about that today: When baby Adalyn was being baptized in our home church in Wheaton and that congregation was promising to pray for Adalyn, encourage her, and help nurture her in faith--at that time, we were joined with a church in Durango in stretching out our hands to the children of that congregation and praying a blessing over them. 

I may never teach Sunday school to Adalyn. But someone will. Many someones in her church family will be a part of her life, as many people were a part of our children's lives, and of mine when I was growing up, and on back up the line and forward down the line of generations, should this world last that long. (Don't worry--I don't know anything you don't about the end of the world; just acknowledging that possibility.)

I wasn't with Adalyn's nuclear church family this morning, but I am part of the extended family, the "holy catholic Church, the communion of saints." 

And (geek alert: those of you who are not Christians or church people or who hold to a different theological accent than I do, please indulge me as I quote from a document that I love):

Of this community I am and always will be

We don't always immediately post about places that we visited.  So our posts, when we do remember to write them, are often out of chronological order.  We hope you don't mind.  I (Steve) was looking at our blog recently and realized that while we had traveled from Florida across the south to Arizona, we hadn't written about any of the places that we'd seen. We skipped right over New Orleans, all of Texas, Carlsbad Caverns, and Las Cruces.  I'll address one of these now with some thoughts about San Antonio.

San Antonio is famous for a few things, most notably the Alamo and the Riverwalk.  The Alamo was a Spanish mission, one of many that dotted the southwest. The missions were typically spaced one day's walk apart, and so San Antonio actually has five missions. We stayed in an RV park that was located on the Riverwalk, between a couple missions and about five miles from the Alamo.  The Riverwalk extends way beyond the downtown area as a bike and walking path along the river. We could have ridden our bikes right into the downtown area, but as securing bikes is challenging, we opted to ride the city bus that stopped right in front of our park.

Mission San Jose is the most complete - with most of the grounds intact.  These grounds included sleeping quarters for the residents, workshops, storage for foodstuffs, and a wall to enclose the entire compound.

The Spanish were looking to populate the new world that they had claimed, and the quickest way to accomplish this was to convert the local Native population. Finding food in the desert southwest can be challenging at certain times of the year, particularly for hunter/gatherer groups. The Spanish brought agriculture, food storage, tool making, and other technologies that enabled the missions to have a steady food supply. This made it relatively easy to recruit local people to work in the missions. In exchange for pledging their allegiance to the king of Spain, adopting the Catholic religion, giving up their culture, and agreeing to work for the mission, they got three meals a day and a place to live. Mission San Jose does a good job of showing a glimpse of what that life might have been like.