I left Big Bend this morning and after 400 miles I arrived in time for sunset at Oliver Lee Memorial Park, New Mexico, about 20 miles from where the first atomic bomb was tested in 1945 near Alamogordo. I’ve already sprouted a tail, which I’m not too fond of, but also wings, which should come in handy. I’m also about 50 miles from where most of the adventures (murdering adventures) of Billy the Kid took place, including the Lincoln County War, which started it all and eventually gave us Emilio Estevez.
Oliver Lee Park is nestled in the foothills of the modest Sacramento mountains, a cozy little spot that people treat as a basecamp for seeing White Sands National Park, which is about 25 miles from here but doesn’t have camping. What it does have is sand, and since I was impressed by the 70 foot sand dunes at Monahans State Park in Texas, I’m preparing to be blown away by the 700 foot sand dunes of White Sands. I’ll stop there tomorrow on my way to Tonto National Forest, about 450 miles from here and 50 miles northwest of Phoenix, where I’ll likely stay for about two weeks.
Leaving Big Bend this morning I saw a coyote, my first of the trip, curiously peeping at a truck that had stopped whose passengers were curiously peeping back at him. He’d obviously been fed at some point by people and was hoping for a snack reunion (I didn’t give him one), but was skittish and pacing. Still, he stayed close, waiting and wanting, since food is the prime motivator for wild animals (and me). He was a cute little devil, light on his feet, about twice the size of a fox, a third the size of a wolf, but not a threat to anything but a small dog. So far for new-to-me animals on this trip, I’ve seen a bobcat, road runners, and a mountain bluebird. Coyotes are nothing new but I’ve definitely never been within 20 feet of one like today, so that was cool.
The wind is relentless in West Texas and most of the houses in the countryside here are one-levels with metal roofs, an adaptation to the heat, I’m sure, but probably the wind as well, because it’s so constant that your second level would eventually give up and blow off to live its own, simpler life as a one level home.
Heading out of Texas into New Mexico I also passed miles and miles of pecan trees and finally crossed into the mountain time zone. I’m not a big fan of pecans (give me cashews or pistachios instead), but New Mexico is second only to Georgia (Texas is third, Arizona fourth) in U.S. pecan production.
On my way out of Big Bend I chatted with a late 30s couple from the Netherlands who have been traveling now for about three years. They were driving about a $900,000 4-wheel drive custom made monster of a vehicle, more like a military or apocalyptic survival kit on wheels than a camper, with 4 foot high tires and several feet of clearance. The guy owned a trucking company and sold it, so they’d set out to see the world with their two little children. With the kids now school aged, they were beginning to head home.
Though the vehicle looked like it might be able to float across the ocean, they’d actually shipped the monster to Halifax to begin their trip, driving across Canada to Alaska, their favorite site among all their travels, he said. Now they were on their way to Miami to ship the beast back. It was even branded “Manfred and the Fam” and had social media icons on it, so I followed them hoping to get a peek inside their home in a socially acceptable way (a Youtube video did not disappoint).
The reason I know the cost is not because I asked them, but because another vehicle, even larger than theirs but the same styling, had come through Big Bend a few days earlier and I looked it up: $1.1 million. My camper was $11,000 and so far so good, although if I ever want a social media following I should probably brand it and slap on some social media icons. “Follow along as I desecrate park and public restrooms across the west with my poor diet at Adam Camperland dot com!”
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