Snowbirding Magnus Style, Day 13

 Sunday, November 16

This was our last day at Desert Oasis, and I was rewarded with a gorgeous sunrise just outside my bedroom window. Their Dark Skies policy here meant that I could leave the window shade open all night, waking to the gentle dawn. I love that. 

Bye, Desert Oasis!

 

After that, same old travel day. We were headed to Rockhound State Park in New Mexico. Along the road the mileage signs all seemed to reference El Paso, even when we were back in Arizona. Are there no big cities along the I-10 in New Mexico?  Because it really looked as if we were going to skip a state, getting on I-10 at around Willcox, Arizona and immediately seeing a sign saying it was 500-some-odd miles to El Paso.

But no, eventually we crossed the New Mexico line—here’s my picture of the welcome sign:

(oops, missed it.)

So indeed, New Mexico does exist.

And then we crossed the Continental Divide—THE Continental Divide, not one of those other continental divides—and we got off the highway in Deming to travel a very bumpy ten miles to Rockhound.

Yes, we’d been there at least once before and I think this might be the place where we took the kids to pick up rocks, long ago on our Spring Break trip out west. I don’t remember the place from the day we spent here way back then. It was probably around 2002 or a little later. But I do remember we picked up a buttload of rocks that we hoped might be thunderstones and we still have the whole heavy bag of them in the garage back home. Waiting to be split. I think we gave a couple of the best ones to Bob. But I don’t remember him finding anything inside them.

Bugs in our campsite! 

But on the last trip, the one I do remember, the current dog and I took a long walk up the mountain in a spitting cold rain. There were a lot of flowers on the little bushes, so it was probably on the way back from Rusty’s RV Ranch. We stopped for a windbreak at one of the big boulders on the way up the hill and when we eventually got up as far as we could go without rock scrambling, I took a picture and we descended via the roundabout route. It would have taken us around the little hill beside the campground and down to the visitor center, but I got a little way along and started worrying that it was going to take us way out of the way, to some of the houses down there, and turned back.

So Ed and I took that same walk, following the roundabout way this time all the way to the visitor center. (Notice I didn’t say “straight” to the visitor center—there is no straight on a trail like that. It’s a glorified goat trail—not even fit for a native American.) But it got us there and we returned. The sign said .5 miles, but it felt like more. It took us about 45 minutes.

 

FROM NOTES:

So now I’m sitting outside with my back to the setting sun, hoodie and windbreaker both zipped up tight. It’s 71 degrees or maybe a little less by now, but the gusty wind is making me cold.  Not quite cold enough to go inside yet.

It’s been partly cloudy all day and that made for a pleasant drive, temperature-wise. But the wind made us suffer. I hope it dies down in a bit, but the forecast calls for windy again tomorrow. We’ll see.