Monday 30th January - Venturing into Mountain time

Completely at random, this morning I awoke shortly after 7am and realised that the sun was about to rise.  Huddled in a hoodie, camera in hand I snuck through to the front of the RV.  It was freezing and it turns out that the rising sun looks very much like the sunsets I had captured the previous two nights, only in reverse:

Is this sunrise or sunset?  Could be either to be honest!

I ran back under the covers until the RV had warmed up a little.

Time to move on again today, once we had sloped into the office to admit to breaking not one but TWO of their sand disks!  The ranger man couldn’t have been nicer.  It seems we are a rarity by being honest about it, most people just try to hide them when they’re broken.  He said ‘it’s no problem’ and that was that.  We raved about how beautiful the park is and he was sincerely grateful for our visit.  A really positive start to the day.

We set the Satnav for a PA site just outside Roswell, New Mexico and estimated a three and a half hour drive.  I took the first stint for some more mind-numbing scenery.  But we weren’t on the interstate for long, turning North onto Highway 285 towards New Mexico.  We felt sad to leave Texas, we love the State, the scale and variation is impressive.  Even now, having crossed the vast majority of the state I was surprised to see that El Paso, in the far west of Texas was still over 200 more miles away!

Crossing into New Mexico not only meant we hit State number 27, it also gave us an extra hour in the day as we moved to Mountain time.  Here we are at the time zone and State border (below), Simon even had a go at time-travelling as per the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film ‘Paul’!

  

 

New Mexico presented us with more wide open space but with added features, like a dam and here we are driving with the Guadalupe Mountains in the distance (right).  

We’d tried calling the RV site but got no reply, however only 30 minutes away we received a call back from the owner and headed straight there.  Apart from a smell hanging in the air that reminded us of Dodge (we are back in cattle country) the site was great, and only $15.50 a night!  The owner was really welcoming and we got into discussion about where we are heading after visiting Roswell tomorrow.  We keep changing our minds you see.  The original plan was to head north, well into Colorado where Simon wanted to see Pikes Peak, (a race track up a mountain or something) and Denver before heading West into Utah and onto Nevada.  But people have warned us that the Rocky Mountains are still too cold in February and we could get snow-bound.  So we’d postponed the idea of Colorado and Utah until March, but would we have time to drive that far across the States and back to the Coast to enter Canada by 8^th April?!  Balancing time and distance with us wanting to visit all 48 States is getting tricky!  Following our discussion this afternoon we may have a plan C!  Head North-West through New Mexico to see some amazing Indian architecture and head for the Four Corners monument… we can visit four states at the same time there! Then get across to Utah and on to more alien antics in Nevada!  It may all change again tomorrow, who knows? But I am really excited at the thought of the landscapes we will be travel through over the next couple of weeks.

Our friendly owner at the Midway RV park had just installed 5G Wi-Fi, time for blogging and laundry at the end of a really positive and easy day.