Day 9 - Magic

Roswell, Roswell, Roswell...you disappointed me so. I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, John of the Abita Mystery House back in Louisiana had warned me. He had said there was nothing there. Technically that's not really true, as Roswell is a nice little town of about 50k people. It's storied history of UFO sightings and the crash of 1947 is something that the town seems to only recently, and somewhat begrudgingly, to embrace as a tourism hook. This means there's really not a whole lot going for Roswell in the weird department. The king of the small alien castle is the the International UFO Museum and Research Center. Yes...research center. Basically the museum is just a culmination of all the supposed facts, questionable testimonies, and replicas of reportedly stolen or repressed bits of evidence. In other words, it's an attempt at a serious museum. That alone was disappointing, but even as a credible museum it's a letdown. Copies of copies of reports, lots of pointless maps, and bad models and dioramas of UFO's and scenarios. It would've been so much better if they had just embraced the absurdity.

I took a walk down Main St. in Roswell hoping for something to jump out, but after checking out a handful of storefronts with some sort of alien theme, all of which ended up being t-shirt screen printers, I left Roswell sorely disappointed. However, driving down what I thought was yet another rural highway I was suddenly grateful of my seemingly pointless trip to Roswell., Had it not been for that side trip, I never would have found Runyans Ranch roadside store where I had cherry cider (which was great), or driven through the breathtaking and mutli-terrained Lincoln National Park which ended in the village of Cloudcroft. Cloudcroft is a small aspen-lined mountain ski resort in the winter, and in the summer a startlingly green vista that was almost 20 degrees cooler than Alamogordo just 14 miles of road and 4,000 feet of elevation away.

I spent a little bit driving around Alamogordo, which I now believe to be the scrap yard for all of New Mexico, but after picking up some chili spiced pistachios I wanted to get on to White Sands National Monument. This is the point of the trip that my GPS pointlessly wasted about 2 hours of my time. Not know the area, I had no way of knowing that White Sands was only about 20 miles down the highway I was already on. But Ms. Garmin, Ms. because it is undoubtedly an attractive single woman with a slight dominatrix streak and fetish for fat guys, decided she wanted to take me 50 miles down a completely different highway, and then take a shortcut through a missile base. A shortcut through an active military installation...that has missiles. BAD GARMIN! Eventually I made it to White Sands, and it was worth the hassle.

The white sands of White Sands are white because it is an enormous, actually another World's Largest, gypsum deposit. This makes for a brilliant white sand that is remarkably cool, even in direct sunlight. Being water soluble, the gypsum dissolves off the San Andres and Sacramento mountings and deposit into dunes in a dried up lake in the Tularosa Basin now known Alkali Flat. The dunes vary in size from only a few feet high to some over 30 feet tall and their stark white color makes a great juxtaposition against the desert mountains nearby. You can drive along the approximately 8 miles of road through the dunes and see quite a lot, but there are also several trails, a boardwalk, and camping in the area too. Something that surprised me were all the kids that were sledding down the dunes on little saucer sleds. I thought for sure this was frowned on by the park, but when I went into museum and shop, they sold their own sleds and even little blocks of sled wax. It's hard to describe how beautiful a bunch of white sand dunes can be, but it was another breathtaking moment.

After a peaceful, calming drive through White Sands I was ready for some food. The bland, hardly worth mentioning breakfast had long since burned off and I had put off eating to try and make up some time, but I couldn't ignore to rumblings any further. So I drove another hour into Las Cruces before I stopped for food. Actually I stopped in the tiny historic town of Mesilla that seems to be part of or a small, quaint tumor of Las Cruces. In Mesilla there is a house that once belonged to a wealthy man. That guy died and a bunch of history happened and many years later the Double Eagle Restaurant opened. They also opened what they claim is New Mexico's only dedicated beef ageing room. I don't really know what that means, except that it means I had the best steak of my life at this restaurant. As if that wasn't enough I also had a superb creme brulee whose flame caramelised crust tasty liked a perfectly toasted marshmallow and custard base was rich but not overly sweet. As a whole, it was one of the best meals I have ever had, and as I said THE best steak.

It was a shame, but I had to leave the Double Eagle, and even more of a shame considering it was about 8pm by this point, I but I needed to hit the road for just a little longer. I'm getting to the point in my trip where I have to start considering the return leg and I wanted to make sure that no matter what happened I made it to Truth or Consequences (T or C). So I hit the road with a full belly and drive another hour and a half to another cheap motel. The plan tomorrow us to check out what T or C has to offer, hopefully spend a night in one of the nicer hotels, but then some time Thursday I need to start heading back East. Thus, T or C is as far West as I'm going to make it and essentially ends the roadtrip as I know it. The path home will be long hours on the interstate to make it back in the shortest time possible. So basically when I leave T or C the honeymoon is over. It's been on my mind on and off today as well. How do I go home after a trip like this? How do I go back to work? This has been an amazing trip and returning to mundanity is a terrifying prospect.