Farley Hits the Desert Southwest, Day 11: Dunes and Extraterrestrials

We woke up in the middle of the night to yet another vacation interloper.  Marc tried to catch this one in the trap, to no avail.  Little bastard set off the trap but wasn't caught.  Marc opened up the cupboard to find himself face-to-face with the little vermin. He reset the trap but didn't manage to catch him.  I guess this is the price you pay at the free BLM campsites, because we haven't had any problems elsewhere.

We started the day by visiting the White Sands National Monument. Since it had rained hard the day before, the sand was pretty hard.  We were glad we didn't invest $10 in a plastic disk to slide down them.  Instead, we just wandered around on the dunes.

Cool sand patterns.

I'm king of the dune world!

From there, we continued on to Alamagordo ("fat cottonwood"), which is largely an AFB and missile-testing town.  We spent some time at the grounds of the New Mexico Museum of Space History.  Honestly, they shouldn't have so much free stuff outside because we were sated and didn't pay the admission fee to go in.

Me, operating a space capsule.

Based on the sheer mileage, we decided to head to Carlsbad Caverns some other time and detoured from Alamagordo to Roswell.  A long, dry drive.  Past the biggest pistachio in the world.  We sampled probably 20 kinds of free flavored pistachios and pistachio brittles (never let cheap people have free samples), as well as pistachio wine (no, just no) and red chili wine (who buys this stuff?).

You can't argue:  That's a big-ass nut.

From there, on to Roswell.  I'd heard the $5 admission for the museum was too high.  Those reports were right.  I was impressed, though, by the local businesses that did have aliens on them.

Apparently aliens bullfight at Mexican
restaurants in Roswell.

The highlight of the museum:  ABDUCTED!

Then was the awful, awful drive from Roswell to Albuquerque.  Barren and desolate.  We stopped for the night a few miles outside of town at a rest area on the interstate.  No pic of Farley.  You've all seen rest areas and semi trucks.