Roundabout adventure to a wedding

What adventures we’ve been having!  And so much luck. Yes, we’ve camped in the single digits without electricity (only one night though and the view was so worth it!!) and set up camp in the dark (but we are very good at that!). We learned that if you set up a tent with snow under the floor, the inside is slippery too on the packed down snow underneath!!  We learned that in the desert every plant is prickly and they blow over the campgrounds so you really can’t wear socks outside even on the blacktop and rocks (!). It takes a long time to pick all those sticky things out! But we have been lucky.  We don’t really like hot weather so doing a trip like this now is fantastic (and usually it isn’t this cold!!) and we don’t like crowds so it isn’t crowded!  We lucked into Grant’s Garage and a quick fix for the truck.  We lucked into Mesa Verde as they had been closed a week due to substantial snowfall and they opened the day we were going to be there, and they ha...

It was an interesting sleep adventure when the temperatures don’t actually get below freezing, but in fact waiver in the lower 40s.  The heater would stop and go determined by the temperature of our tent cube and over the course of the night, socks came off, extra shirts came off and extra blankets came off as it was too warm otherwise. Breaking camp is quick and easy at this point and we were ready ahead of schedule. We had a drive to get to Carlsbad Caverns as we had a time slot for entering the caves.  Today is the self-guided tour.  The roads were blocked (?) as we stopped and got some coffee for the road (easier to buy when you are in town vs either starting up a fire or the coffee maker) and our GPS took us on an interesting detour. This particular detour put us on a rock road and then we drove THROUGH a creek which had a trickling of water.  We drove on a little more and we encountered another creek and then, yes, I kid you not, a Family Dollar semi.  We ...

White Sands sounds like such a plain name for such a magnificent place.  It is a protected plain between two mountain ranges with its start over 200 million years ago when the area was water and over the course of those millions of years it evolved to what it is today, so much gypsum sand. You can only enter on days that the roads are open as they are often blocked due to testing and research by the military which owns the neighboring property.  We were lucky in that it was a cool windy day, only about 65 degrees.  The visitor’s center and gift shop offer a glimpse of the history of the area and we could fill our hydration packs before we headed on our way into the park.  There is a very nice 8 mile drive loop you can take, which we did.  It is paved to start but then is just packed down sand.  It is like driving into another world, as you drive in and everything as far as you can see is white.  The roads and the dunes, which go on forever, small, larg...

  It was chilly this morning but packing up is easy when you just leave your wigwam hotel room.  We left as the sun was rising over the wigwam village. :) Each wigwam has its own historic car parked in front for ambiance. We drove towards Saguaro National Park and my, oh my, the landscape is so diverse and unbelievable.  Flatter than flat plains that give way to hills and then immense valleys/cliffs!  Sometimes there is snow and sometimes not!  The temperature rises as we head south.  We have seen many a “cow” signs over our week of travels to warn about random cows that could be out and about and low and behold today there was a small herd of cows just hanging out.  We have seen small herds of wild horses but today was our first wild cow sighting.  Saguaro National Park has only been a park since 1994; before that it was a monument and two different mountain districts were combined to create one park.  There are actually two of them, the eas...

The campground was quite lovely.  Starkly beautiful, and only a few campers.  An Airstream, a car which I am assuming they slept in as there wasn't a tent or camper near, an old old truck camper hauling a jeep and dirt bike, and a really, really, really big one that people tend to live in or travel for long periods of time in.  The sun was rising in our rear view as we headed to Meteor Crater for our 8 o’clock entry and rim tour. Meteor Crater is quite interesting.  Over 50,000 years ago a meteor crashed here and spread rocks and meteorites in every direction for over 100 miles.  Back in the day everyone including scientists thought it was a volcanic crater but a mining engineer determined it to be from a meteor.  It is now owned by descendants of the Baringer family and also a local rancher who owns the property surrounding it.  We didn’t get to hike the rim because of the snow and ice but did have a very informative interpreter and movie and we could...