Back to Long Beach, California

3 October 2013

We didn’t dilly-dally the rest of the way home.  North of Las Cruces is the White Sands Missile Range. The reason I am the only one in my family not born in South Dakota is because my father was doing construction work at the WSMR when I was born. The thing I can’t figure out is why I was born in Tucumcari.  My mom always said that it was because that was where the closest hospital was, but when I look at the map, it seems to me that Albuquerque would have been closer.  Oh well, makes for interesting dinner conversation.

 

We stopped at the museum and missile park just inside the Las Cruces gate.  The museum is in an old office building – I immediately recognized the government construction model of manager offices and conference rooms around the perimeter of a large bull-pen area, having lived in that environment for much of my professional career. There were some great exhibits on Trinity – the project that tested the first atomic bomb. Twice a year, they lead caravans out to ground zero, but we missed it by a week. The missile park had nothing newer than the 1980s, but it was well displayed.  Except for one missile, which apparently fell over recently having rusted out at the base. If a missile falls in a missile park and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?

 

We had delicious Mexican  food in Las Cruces, the chili con carne was amazing! We did overnight stops near Tucson and Blythe as we just charged down Interstate 10.  Because of the coming high winds, we cancelled our visit to Indio and got home on Thursday instead of Friday.

 

We were gone for 92 days, put over 8,000 miles on our van and camped in 12 states. I was able to cross several items off my bucket list including visiting the Gateway Archway in St. Louis and Carlsbad Caverns. We discovered some great places like the Amana Colonies and visited some of our favorite spots like Notre Dame and Shipshewana. Along the way, we sampled some of the local cuisine; you can skip the horseshoe sandwich in Springfield, Illinois, but the MaidRite burgers in Iowa were pretty good.

 

I love our new trailer, the extra space with the slideouts really made our camping comfortable. As usual, Russ did a terrific job driving and being the photographer (most of the photos in this blog are his.)

 

I found out lots about our ancestors in Iowa and will be spending the next several weeks scanning and updating my family tree.  Searching out these ancestors added another dimension to our enjoyment of the places we visited. And it led us to places that aren’t on the regular tourist routes. That can make it a bit challenging to find a decent campground but we managed.

 

All in all, a great way to spend a summer in our retirement.  Next trip – a cruise around South America. 

Guadalupe Peak, the tallest peak in Texas at over 8700 feet.

Entering Texas - the Guadalupe mountains in the distance are part of the 40 mile long reef that includes the Carlsbad Caverns. 

A closer look at the Guadalupe Mountain range. Guadalupe Peak is the last one on the left.

Just around the bend from Guadalupe Peak is El Capitan.

The salt flats on the way to El Paso were covered with water from recent rains.

It is a rather steep descent into the El Paso area, pretty much straight down.

 

This is a slide rule for calculating missile parameters.  The largest slide rule I have seen.

A V2 rocket made for testing at the White Sands Missile Range. After WWII, the U.S. made arrangements for the German rocket engineers, including Werner Von Braun, to come to New Mexico to design and test rockets.

A Patriot launcher used during the Iraq war.



This is a casing for the Fat Man atomic bomb. The bomb was tested at White Sands (only once), then was used for the Nagasaki bombing.

This looks like the kind of rocket that Buck Rogers rode in the old movies.

 

 

Carlsbad, New Mexico

29 September 2013

First night out of Oklahoma City was Wichita Falls, Texas. Didn’t do any sightseeing there and left the next morning for Lubbock. The roads in Texas are SO much better than the ones in Oklahoma.  And we had to pay for the privilege of driving that horrible road, Interstate 44, through Oklahoma. The drive to Lubbock was through flat, flat land covered with fields of cotton, soybeans and peanuts.  Not a lot of trees to break the horizon. And not a lot of towns.  I miss the green fields of Iowa.

We stopped in a small town, Guthrie, Texas, to get gas, but couldn’t find the gas station. As we were turning around in the parking lot of the city hall, a woman in a pickup stopped and asked us if we needed help.  When we asked where the gas station was, she told us to follow her and she escorted us to the store.  Nice people around here. Turns out the town was really a company town for the 6666 Ranch and we got gas at the Supply House. I googled the ranch and found out that it is well known for quarter horses and cattle. It has about 200,000 acres and is one of the largest ranches in the Panhandle region of Texas.

Lubbock turned out to be a rather interesting town. We spent a bit of time at the Silent Wings Museum, a tribute to the glider pilots of World War II.  It is housed in the old air terminal of Lubbock International Airport. We also visited the Wind Energy Museum which contains a bazillion windmills.  The docent gave us a great individual tour and I learned a lot about the history and use of windmills. The museum was not a “garage” museum like I saw all through Alaska even though it had lots of windmills and associated parts. It was laid out in a very attractive manner. Besides windmills inside the museum, the fields surrounding the museum building was a veritable garden of windmills.

Then we decided, since it was still early in the day, to take in the South Plains Texas Fair. This was no Iowa State Fair. Either we missed the animal competitions or they hadn’t started yet, either way, there were no cows, pigs, goats, sheep or chickens to be seen in the exhibit buildings. There were a few bunnies to admire and that was it. The domestic exhibits weren’t very impressive and they weren’t displayed very attractively.  We finished with the fair in about 2 hours and agreed that we would probably stick with state fairs from now on.

We finished our tour of Lubbock by driving through Texas Tech University.  This is a beautiful campus.  The buildings are Spanish Renaissance architecture which looks great in this southwestern area and they have done a great job of keeping the new buildings in harmony with the older ones. The football stadium is beautiful and you can tell that sports are important in this neck of the woods. Over 32,000 students attend this school and the surrounding area is full of student apartments and fast food restaurants.  I doubt that there is a lot of integration of the campus with the city since the rest of the area looks to be pretty downtrodden.

 

Our next stop was Carlsbad, New Mexico. Like Texas, the roads in New Mexico are great and we had a very nice drive down to Carlsbad. Less farming and more cattle ranches as the land gets drier and drier.

 

The caverns are 20 miles south of Carlsbad and we arrived at the visitor center early on Thursday. Our Senior Golden Eagle pass got us in for free (that is the best $10 dollars we have spent in a while) and we were soon down in the cave.  There is an elevator that takes you down 800+ feet in about a minute, so my ears were popping. The Big Room is over 14 football fields deep, 625 feet wide and over 200 feet high and we spent more than 4 hours walking along the paved paths which take you all the way to the back. One great thing about being retired is that we can visit these kinds of places during the offseason.  There weren’t a lot of people around and we could spend as much time as we wanted gawking at the beautiful formations. It was dank and chilly down there so we were glad we wore our heavy sweatshirts. Even so, I felt like I had been in a deep cold soak and it took a while up in the visitor center for me to warm up. After lunch in the restaurant, we took in the bookstore and gift shop then headed outside to take a drive through the Chihuahuan desert. There is a 10 mile gravel tour which winds its way through the desert with various stops along the way explaining the geography, geology and history of the desert.  I could see why they didn’t allow motorhomes or trailers on the tour – it was pretty steep in some areas with sheer drop-offs. Even through the tour pamphlet said there was lots of life in the area, we only saw birds. None of those six foot long rattlesnakes as thick as a person’s leg. That was ok with me. I was surprised at how green the area was, turns out that the area has had quite a bit of rain the past few weeks, so we were seeing the benefits of that – lots of wildflowers and green grasses.

 

Late in the afternoon, we headed back to the visitor’s center for the Bat Flight. Every evening, bats come out for their night feeding and the park service has built an amphitheater in front of the cave opening so we can watch it. The bats do not come out of the regular cavern opening; there is another entrance behind the visitor center. They have an interpretive program before the flight so we learned quite a bit about freetail Mexican bats and their history in Carlsbad Caverns. The bats aren’t on a schedule, so you don’t really know when they are going to head out. The park service has placed sound sensors deep into the entrance and we get an advance notice when they head out.  At that point, everyone had to be quiet and just watch.  No electronics were allowed to be on and no photography was allowed.

 

Boy, the flight was impressive! We watched for about 30 minutes until it got so dark we couldn’t see the bats flying out, grouping up and heading out.  And they were still coming out.  They estimate that there are over 400,000 bats in the cave! The next day, I was asking one of the Park Rangers some questions about the bats and she said that what we saw was a migratory flight, meaning they are heading down to Mexico for the winter. These bats don’t hibernate. Instead they go to Mexico in groups and stay in caves down where it is warmer and there are lots of bugs to eat.

 

The next day, we spent another couple of hours in the Big Room, just marveling at the size of the space and the variety of formations. Then Russ went on a guided tour to another part of the Cavern while I took a break up in the Visitor Center. We watched a nice video on the caves administered by the National Park Service, then headed back to Carlsbad for the night. This was one of the most inspiring National Parks I have been to. It is impossible for me to get my head wrapped around the millions of years it took to create the caverns and their formations. I am so glad our government spends some of our tax money to purchase and run these national parks. And I am glad that they make the caves accessible for us tourists.  Back in the day, we would have had to be lowered that 800+ feet in a guano bucket. And the lighting that has been installed has added so much dramatic beauty. We are so blessed to have such wondrous natural areas in our country.

 

Sunday, we continue our trip west via Las Cruces and Tucson.  Should be home next week.

 

The campground in Oklahoma City was one of the nicest we've stayed at - paved with landscaped grounds.

A Texas RV!

Lots of cotton fields were between Wichita Falls and Lubbock.

The Texas Panhandle is incredibly flat. The road we were on was in good condition and very straight.

Interesting vehicles on the highway.  Russ wanted to try driving under this one, but I wouldn't let him.

 

The Silent Wings Museum is housed in the old Lubbock air terminal, so we had nice views of the runways as well as some very interesting exhibits.

The gliders were designed to transport people and equipment.  They were not very sophisticated vehicles - wood and cloth with just a few gauges. Most of the pilots were trained here at Lubbock.

This was specifically designed to be small and light so that it could be transported in gliders. Once the glider landed, the bulldozer was used to grade runways for large airplanes and more equipment.  I will have to go through my family pictures - I think I have a WWII photo of my dad on one of these. He was an airplane mechanic for the Flying Tigers in the Burma campaign. The museum specifically talked about the use of the gliders in the Burma campaign, so it is entirely possible that he saw these bulldozers.

 

This is a replica of the first windmill built in the American colonies in the 1700s. The original is in Virginia. The fan on the back serves to move the windmill into the wind.

 

Lots and lots of windmills inside the museum, most from the 1800s.

 

The small windmill served as a wind vane to align the larger fan into the wind.

 

Unbelievably, this is a real bird's nest made out of barbed wire. Cowboys leave behind small pieces when they repair fences out on the range. Ravens have figured out that these work in the absence of twigs (not a lot of trees out on those ranges.) They line the nest with leaves and softer material.

 

This was called a woman's windmill. The windmills needed lots of oil and the original ones required someone (usually the farmwife) to climb up to oil it, sometimes once a day. This particular windmill allowed a person to lower the fan so it could be oiled from the ground. 

 

The South Plains Texas Fair is held annually in Lubbock.

 

In addition to the standard bakery entries, competitions of tortillas are held.

 

This tall guy rode his little scooter around the fair singing in a rather annoying robotic voice.  This was probably the most exciting thing we saw at the fair.

 

Some cute bunnies had started to arrive at the exhibit building.

 

 

The agricultural competitions included best cotton plant stalk for commercial harvesting

 

Entrance to Texas Tech University campus.

 

This is an example of the Spanish renaissance architecture design that most buildings had.

 

 

This is the front of the football stadium - very impressive!

 

 

Very dramatic lighting adds a rich dimension to the caverns. There is a paved path with guiderails to help you get through the caverns and to protect the formations from people.

It took hundreds of thousands of years to create these huge formations.

 

 

Some of the formations are named - the one on the right is called totem pole.  It is probably 60 feet tall.

 

There were lots of side chambers with their own unique sets of formations.

 

This formation is called the Rock of Ages.  Long ago, the guided tours would stop here, they would turn out the lights to make the cave totally dark, then they would light this formation and everyone would sing "Rock of Ages". That was back when a lot of folks knew the song. Now the tour is self guided. no lights go out (hopefully) and there is no singing.

 

 

On the guided tour, Russ walked down this ramp area for about 800 feet to get to the King's Palace.

 

 

 

Although no one knows the exact age of the formations in the Caverns, this ranger pointed out these little baby stalactites as being about 80 years old.  They know this because this area had been blasted out to make an entrance to the King's Palace area 80 years ago.

 

Some of the dramatic draperies in the King's Palace area.

 

 

 

The King's Palace area used to be self-guided, but they lost over 10,000 formations over 10 years from people not following the rules, so now it is guided only.

The ocotillo plants were beautiful.

This is the view from the front of the Visitor Center.

The road leading up to the Visitor Center which is on top of an ancient reef which was covered with sentimentary rock, then pushed up into mountains. The Caverns were carved out of the reef by sulfuric acid millions of years ago.