Our New Mexico Trip -- Day Three: White Sands, Alamagordo and Cloudcroft

Las Cruces, as a small agricultural college town, reminded me much of my hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado in the 1980s. It was relaxed and open, and comfortable. It was hard to leave it so soon, but in after our second night we checked out and drove northeast across the White Sands Missile Range, where the highway is sometimes still closed for missile tests. 

Our destination was the White Sands National Park, where one can leave the highway and drive out into the dunes. I didn't expect to love it so much. The gypsum sands, even shifting so as to threaten the road, are indeed about as white as they come. It was a moderate spring day. We parked at one of the pullouts and enjoyed several hours of sitting in one of the shelters. Jessica made sketches in her sketch books while I took notes in my notebook of the thoughts going through my head. There were many families with children, who love to sled on the dunes. It felt like being at the beach but without an ocean. It was as peaceful as I have felt in a long time. We were glad we had gotten there early, as the line coming into the park at the entrance was ferocious by the time we left.

From there we drove into Alamagordo, which is an interesting town. There is no downtown really. Just businesses along a highway, and lots of low income housing and poverty. Not a place that one would find easy to live. We meandered through the city, even attempting to visit the World's Largest Pistachio, a monument outside a roadside stand which turned out to be smaller than we expected. In fact, Jessica had thought it was a real pistachio that was oversized. It looks better on the postcards than in real life. 

The most interesting thing in town is the New Mexico Space Museum, which has an outdoor permanent exhibition of parts of rockets and missiles that were tested decades ago at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. 

From there we drove up into the mountains, which are the last bit of the Rockies going eastward, the last mountains until the Ozarks. We stopped at the Old Apple Barn and had some coffee and pecan pie and then found our motel in the mountain community of Cloudcroft, which is like a Colorado ski town. We had dinner at the Cloudcroft Brewing Company, a local pizza brew pub which was lively. I enjoyed their imperial stout (I always order the darkest beer). The ski season was just ending. It's always a good time to visit places like this. It was nice to see snow still on the ground. 

Outdoor exhibit of a rocket engine at the New Mexico Space Museum in Alamagordo

The Old Apple Barn on the way up to Cloudcroft