Like a Rolling Stone

Today's View:

Today, we had hoped to depart White Sands by lunchtime, then we were planning to drive up to northwestern NM to spend the night. We have established over the course of the road trip that we are physically incapable of waking up on time, so we didn't leave Roswell until around 11am. Following a wonderful gas station breakfast (juice, milk, and muffins), we departed for White Sands. Several different websites had warned us to call or check ahead of time to make sure there was no "missile testing" occurring on the day of our visit, which would result in us being blown up. That would put a damper on things. Luckily, the next Missile Test is scheduled for Saturday night. We saw several signs nearby indicating that various stretches of road would be closed in the case of missile testing. You kind of get the sense that you are in the middle of nowhere if the government has enough space to blow things up and not worry too much about disurbing or harming local residents.

We came over the top of a hill to see a large, flat expanse of white sand in the distance. We eventually wound our way around to the entrance, and we proceeded to buy our obligatory national park magnet. We then rented a sled for some sand-sledding, which was really, really fun. The sand really was white, a result of the sand particles being composed of gypsum. The park was basically a large, white wonderland where you were allowed to run around and do whatever you wanted to do. There were only two rules: the #1 rule was to bring water, and the #2 rule was that you weren't allowed to steal any sand. We wound around until we found a big dune, and we basically frolicked around for an hour, sledded, sweat, and raced up the hill (if you know us at all, you know that we have to make everything a competition). Jenny definitely won all of the uphill races, generally dominating like she did in home run derby the other day.

Some Scenery from White Sands National Monument:

Us posing on a dune:

Us racing up a hill (Jenny won):

Robbie sledding:

Jenny sledding:

Robbie plus scenery:

After we left White Sands, our amazing gas station breakfast had worn off. Looking at the map, the only things around were one town (Alamogordo) and a large missile testing range, so we decided to head in the general direction of town. At this point, it was 4:00, so we decided to have one of our patented "combined meals" of lunch-dinner, AKA Linner. We had an important decision to make: either choose Subway, which would be the healthy choice but will probably leave us starving in about 4 hours, or "strap on the feed bag" as my dad would say, and choose Golden Corral. Robbie and I realized a year or so into our relationship (in a conversation where we both ended up sort of ashamed) that we both quietly liked buffets. Orlando has ruined the idea of the buffet for us over the past several years, but we decided to give Golden Corral a chance today. It didn't disappoint. We basically used the opposite of all of those dietitian-rules, like "eat slowly so your body has time to register that it's full". In this case, we tried to eat quickly and as much as possible to not only "get our money's worth", but to make the meal last until midnight (which it has). Of course, we felt like absolute crap for the first couple hours, but we basically won a small victory against the buffet industry tonight.

We left Alamogordo way, way behind schedule, but we finally made it to our goal destination of Gallup, which is around 20 miles from the AZ border. We had one incident along the way at a rest area. We knew we were in for a treat when we pulled up and there was a "Beware: Snakes" sign out front. Robbie innocently opened the men's restroom door to find a tarantula scurrying around the floor. This rest area actually had two men's restrooms, I suppose for situations such as this when creepy wildlife take over one of the restrooms. It took about 10 minutes of Jenny's gentle coaxing and convincing that tarantulas really don't eat people to get Robbie to go into the other restroom, but he eventually became brave and we were able to get back on the road.

Uhh...should we really stop here?


We are getting up early (hopefully), heading to the petrified forest, and then driving up to our next campsite to set up camp for a couple of days.

Today's route:

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