Great Sand Dunes to Lake of the Ozarks.

Leaving Santa Fe, we traveled north heading for Great Sand Dunes national park.  The dunes are the tallest dunes in North America and are caused by the geography and climate.
The drive is very picturesque and you end up in the San Luis valley, a high altitude (7000+ feet) valley between several mountain ranges.  The valley has lot of agriculture (potatoes). The Rio Grande river also starts in the mountains that form the western side of the valley.  It is interesting that this area was settled long before the Spanish came through California or Europeans from the East.  The settlers came from Mexico and Central America. They also settled Santa Fe on their way to the San Luis valley. 
The dunes are created due to sand being created by rains on the western mountains and the winds blowing it to the other side of the valley where it collects against the mountains on the eastern side of the valley. In addition, it is snow melt streams that keep returning the sand back to valley floor.
It is an amazing sight to drive along the valley floor and then see large sand dunes pop up.  We stayed in a campground very near the park that offered a view of the dunes. The campground also had a large concession area and rented boards for surfing on the sand.  (We did not try this.)

Our campsite. Sparse but with great views of the valley and dunes

View of the dunes from our campsite.

At the park visitor center.  There is a stream between here and the dunes beyond.

The dunes to climb. One of the tallest on the left.

On our way up. 8000' + altitude.

The wind continually erases and creates new peaks.

We started to climb early since it would get hotter in the afternoon. Climbing is really hard because the sand is soft and you sink in a little. It is really hard work and the altitude does not help you strength or stamina.  Also, when you think you reached a top dune, you discover more dunes beyond.  We only went about a third of the way up.

Looking back at the valley. Our campsite was down there a ways on the left

Your shoes collect a lot of sand.

We had a very pretty sunset.

We also visited a nearby fort.  It was built nearby but they determined it would not be a good location to defend so they moved it to this current location.  It is now a museum with very nice displays of the history of this area.

We left the area on Thursday and headed through Colorado and Kansas taking highway 50. We went through Cimarron,  Dodge City, Wichita, to Nevada, MO and picked up highway 54, which took us to Osage Beach.  We planned to spend the Labor Day weekend at the lake and made it Friday night.  We had to park our trailer at Lake of the Ozarks State Park since we could not park our trailer at our condo lot due to rules that only allow boat trailers.  The state park is very near our condo so, other than the added expense, it was not a problem.   We returned home on Tuesday, after the Labor Day weekend.

Post Wedding in Santa Fe

We stuck around for a few days to help clean up and return things from the wedding, like the sound equipment.  On Sunday, Megan hitched a ride with Keri and Elliott to the airport. We planned to stay until Tuesday so we could take Kevin and Cina to the airport for their honeymoon trip to New Zealand.
After helping Megan clean out her condo and get over to Keri's, we had the rest of Sunday to ourselves. We took a trip up to Bandelier National Monument, which is a deserted Native American settlement located in a valley northwest of Santa Fe. It is near Los Alamos.
Bandelier features several cave dwellings carved into the rock walls of the valley plus remains of large settlements on the valley floor.

Cave dwelling. Not real deep.

Foundations from the ancient settlement

The mesa where this settlement is located is built up from ash from a volcanic eruption. The rock is fairly soft which allowed the early americans to carve these dwellings.

Overlook of Rio Grande river

 On the way back from Bandelier, there is an overlook of the Rio Grande river, which starts in the mountains north of Santa Fe.
On Monday, we took Kevin and Cina to the airport. On the way back we stopped at another National Monument called Tent Rocks.

Another cave dwelling at Tent Rocks

These structures are what give Tent Rocks its name.

These are also called hoodoos

Hanging out with the hoodoos

We returned to Santa Fe and toured the miraculous Loretto Chapel. It has a fantastic spiral staircase that takes two full turns to reach the choir loft. The story is that the nuns prayed for a solution and a carpenter appeared and build the stairs with just hand tools and no nails. It has no center supporting column. The nuns believed it was St. Joseph himself who answered their prayers.  The carpenter left and did not ask for payment.  The original stairs did not have a hand rail and the nuns were too scared to use the steps. A local carpenter added a hand rail 10 years later. It is a beautiful work of art and intriguing story.

The miraculous Loretto staircase

 We are planning to leave Santa Fe the next morning (Tuesday) and start our journey back.

Kevin's Wedding

It has been a long time since the last post.  The holidays and such got in the way of blogging progress. At the last post, we were in Santa Fe at the campground, touring a bit, and getting ready for the wedding. This post covers the wedding, which occurred on August 24, 2019.

Katie, Megan, and I, plus others, arrived early at the Randall Davey Audubon Center to set up and decorate for the festivities, which started around 1:00.  We first went to Megan's condo to pick up flowers, centerpieces and other floral decorations. Megan pulled an all-nighter to get these ready.

The weather was beautiful. It was a clear, sunny day and cool in the morning but got a bit warm in the afternoon, especially in the sun.  The site is in a valley outside of Santa Fe with beautiful views of foothills. The center has a brand new building set up for events. It has a kitchen, bathrooms and dance floor. It also is open on the side that faces the valley giving a wonderful view of the event.

Sign greeting guests as they arrived on the shuttle bus. Mix up on the wording for one of the signs. 

Megan's mess, getting the flowers ready at the center

The new event facility. Dance and catering space inside, patio for tables.

Randall Davey's original house, an historic site.

The commitment ceremony, presided by their friends that introduced them

Customized corn hole game.

Kevin and Cina had the event catered by a Mexican restaurant that provide excellent food. Whole foods provided pies and cakes for dessert. Kevin brought is some beer from the Santa Fe brewery.  Everyone had a great time.  The highlight of the festivities was a choreographed wedding dance put on by Kevin and Cina. It started as a standard slow dance and then morphed into a complete dance routine. It was the hit of the wedding. Cina, who studied dance, designed the routine and they practiced for a month prior to the wedding. 

The famous wedding dance.

On to Santa Fe

August 19-23

It is a fairly short drive from Alamogordo to Santa Fe, so we did not rush to get going in the morning. We arrived in the early afternoon and found our campsite and set up.  It was a very nice camp ground with lots of trees and grass and located about 4 miles from the main part of Santa Fe.  However, traffic is really heavy and it took a long time getting anywhere. In addition, the roads are crooked, change names and are very confusing, particularly in the old section of town where all the action is. 

Our campsite even had a lawn where we could set up our Clam, a portable screened-in enclosure. However, mosquitoes where not a problem and the lawn area had a sprinkler system which gave it a shower every morning so we took it down. It also turned out that we were rarely at our campsite the entire week due to wedding duties.

After setup we had to head to Albuquerque to pick up Megan and Lucy, plus 4 suitcases of stuff for the wedding.  We got Megan back to Santa Fe and setup in the nice apartment she rented. The apartment was near the main plaza which is the heart of Santa Fe. Megan's apartment became flower central as she was responsible for flower arrangements at Kevin and Cina's wedding thing.

Kevin and Cina flew into NM on Tuesday AM and we met them at the Santa Fe Sam's Club to buy wine and things for the ceremony.  We also met Cina's mom, Martha, for the first time. We went to dinner that evening with them at Cina's favorite Mexican restaurant. There are literally hundreds of Mexican restaurants to choose from and by the end of the week we no longer wanted Mexican food, we found a steak place.

New Mexico is touted as the chili capital of the world. There lots of them for sale all over Santa Fe. Almost every food item in restaurants has green chilies in them. There is even a green chili beer we found.  Santa Fe is also in the mountains and sits at 7000 feet so it was not quite as hot as lower elevations. It is also very dry so staying hydrated is important. There is a ski area nearby and the better known Taos area is only an hour away.

On Wednesday, we took a tour of Santa Fe. It has over 80 art galleries and they are everywhere. It also is the site of a historic basilica and the miraculous staircase at the Loretto chapel. This chapel had a choir loft and the nuns would not use a ladder, as was common in that time. They needed a staircase so they prayed and a man showed up and built a two turn spiral staircase that does not have a center support post nor is it attached to the wall. He built it with simple hand tools and then disappeared without payment after completion.  It did not have a hand rail and the nuns were afraid to use it so they later contracted another carpenter to add an outer and inner hand rail. It is a thing of beauty.

The Basilica of Santa Fe

The miraculous staircase. The support was added later.

Santa Fe was also the check-in point for scientists enlisted for the Manhattan project which took place at Los Alamos, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe. There is a plaque on the wall in what is now a pottery shop commemorating this. Our guide said that scientists went in the front door and where not seen again as they were secretly escorted out the back door to Los Alamos. 

Besides helping Megan get her flowers together, I did get to play golf twice, on Thursday and Friday morning. Thursday, Elliott and I played Black Mesa, a beautiful, tough course about 25 miles north of Santa Fe set in the mesa and canyons. A local said to always take an iron into the rough as you might encounter a snake. Yikes. On Friday, Elliott, Andy, and Tom Etzkorn, a old friend in town for the wedding, and I played the Santa Fe CC. A bit flatter and friendlier course for a hacker like me.

A signature par 3 up into a canyon at Black Mesa

The greens and fairways were excellent. Off the course is trouble

One of two ponds on the course.

Beautiful vistas on almost every hole.

Alamogordo and White Sands

It has been a while since we have posted.  We were busy with family, the wedding, and plagued with poor WIFI. So, there will be a series of updates to cover our travels to Santa Fe and return.

August 16-19

After visiting the International UFO Museum, we headed to Alamogordo, NM where we plan to meet up with Keri, Elliott and kids.  The trip is up and over some mountains where we landed in the KOA.  Keri and fam arrived Saturday afternoon and we had a small party going in our spot. As the weather was very hot, there were not a lot of campers.

Chilling at our campsite.

 

Prior to their arrival, we visited Cloudcroft for lunch on Saturday. Cloudcroft is 15 miles on the road but 4000 feet higher in elevation.  It is also 20 degrees cooler.  It is a totally different climate and ecology than Alamogordo.  It has lots of trees and even a ski resort.

A tunnel on the way to Cloudcroft. On the other side it is much greener, more trees, etc.

At the tunnel stop. There are climbers going up the rock wall

Downtown Cloudcroft

Main drag. It was crowed up here.

On Sunday, we visited White Sands to show the kids the white dunes and let them saucer in the sand. The KOA was nice enough to loan us two saucers which we would have had to rent at the dunes.  While the saucer does go down the sand, it is not nearly as fast as snow. 

We left dunes at lunch time and decided to avoid the heat by returning to Cloudcroft for lunch. There is a fairly new brewery there with a neat patio, great pizza and good brews.  We also stopped on the way up to view the restored railroad trestle that was used in the late 1800's and 1900's to move passengers up to Cloudcroft to escape the heat. Cloudcroft was resort destination for people from as far as El Paso. The train was the only way up and it was a major endeavor just to build the railway.  This trestle is only one of many that had to be built.  In addition, the train had do a switchback, where it stopped, went in reverse up a ramp, and then forward up an another track to permit making the grade.  It was multi-hour grueling trip on the train just to get there. 

Restored trestle that let the train get to Cloudcroft.

We also visited a Pistachio farm. For some reason, this is big growing area for these nuts.

World's largest pistachio, so they claim

At all other times we were at the pool, cooling off.  The kids and we really enjoyed our time together at the campground. Keaton slept in the trailer with Keri, while Elly slept with her dad in a tent.  Fortunately, it cooled off enough at night so they could get some sleep. 
Tomorrow is Monday so it will be on to Santa Fe. Keri and Elliott are heading to Albuquerque to swap out rental cars. (They flew into El Paso and needed to get rid of their more expensive one way rental. )

Alien Invasion

August 15

We left Clyde Texas and took non-interstate 380 towards Roswell, NM, home of the 1947 UFO crash landing. It was amazing to see the miles and miles of cotton fields in west Texas. We ate lunch in Brownfield, TX which, besides cotton, claims to be the "grapevine capital" of Texas.
Once into New Mexico, the agriculture stopped and it became nothing but brush and large cattle ranches.  We made our into Roswell in the mid afternoon.

Aliens welcoming us to our campground

This is the entrance to our campground. As you can see, aliens are everywhere.  The WIFI password even was "aliens51". 
We stopped by the visitor center and got maps, etc. They even take your picture with visitors from out of state. Guess who is from Missouri.

As we had a few hours, we drove to Bottomless Lakes state park. The lakes are just large sinkholes with water in them and not bottomless.  One of the larger lakes has a beach and swimming.

August 16

We left the campground and headed to the International UFO Museum in downtown Roswell.  It has detailed displays of the Roswell Incident along with many affidavits and testimony of witnesses.  One of the authors of several books on the subject gave a presentation on the incident. There were over 600 people who witnessed some of the weird happenings that occurred and the governments responses. However, there is no physical evidence. There are eyewitness claims that the Army picked up all the stuff and the dead aliens and flew them out to top secret hidings.
It was amazing to us how many people where at this museum early on a Friday morning. 

Some of the visitors to the museum

We then headed out of Roswell on our way to Alamogordo, NM to meet up with Keri, Elliott, and kids on Saturday, the 17th, to let the kids camp with us, swim in the KOA pool, visit White Sands, and then head toward Santa Fe. The weather has been brutal, high 90's to over 100 in the afternoon. But, it is a dry heat.