The Corner of New Mexico (and a few other states)

My nook at Navajo Lake
State Park

I headed north-west out of Albuquerque on 550, and very much enjoyed the gorgeous scenery!  I only had a slight problem finding a spot to camp (it was the Friday of Labor Day weekend).  I found a spot on my second try in Navajo Lake State Park.  I had a fantastic little nook up on a bluff overlooking the lake!  There was even the perfect bolder to perch on while gazing out at the lake!      The next morning, I headed to Aztec Ruins National Monument.  It’s a little confusing since the ruins are actually from the ancestral Pueblo people (or Anasazi).  The ruins were huge and in shockingly good shape!  It was amazing to get to walk through a good portion of the rooms!  It’s remarkable to realize that the structures were built with relatively few tools and are still standing today! 

Aztec Ruins National Monument 

After exploring the ruins, I went to the four corners monument, where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. It’s in the middle of nowhere on an Indian Reservation.  There’s nothing there except the monument, some porta potties, and some booths for people to sell souvenirs.  It was kind of cool to get to be in four places at once and walk from state to state so easily. 

Four Corners Monument 

My section of
Manti-La Sal
National Forest

After leaving four corners, I proved to myself that I am incapable of having (or at least sticking to) a plan.  I had originally thought that I would leave four corners and start wandering through Colorado, but when I got in the car, I was struck with the urge to go to Utah. So I did!  I loved the drive through the south-eastern corner of the state!  I drove past the turn off for Devil's Canyon in Manti-La Sal National Forest, but after driving for a few more miles, I was still thinking out how beautiful it looked, so I turned around.  It was a good call!  It was very beautiful and extremely peaceful up in the mountains!  I really enjoyed having a significant amount of the gorgeous forest to myself!  I had a leisurely afternoon and evening of reading in the warm Utah sun!  It was a lovely introduction to Utah!    

View from my tent in Manti-La Sal National Forest

Lava, Ruins, and a City

Valley of the Fires Rec Area

After a very long a treacherous drive down and out of the mountains in Gila National Forest, I got a tip from my uncle about a park near Carrizozo, New Mexico.  As I got near to the Valley of Fires Rec Area, I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing.  It kind of looked like a road was all broken up and had tons of cacti and other various plants growing in the rubble.  After further investigation, the ruble was actually hardened lava that flowed all over the area over a thousand years ago!  It was a most bizarre and beautiful sight!  I was also pleased to find out that they encourage you to climb on the lava to your heart’s content!   I enjoyed sitting on a section of lava and watching the sun set over the lava and the mountains in the distance.  It was quite peaceful until I realized I didn’t bring a flashlight with me up on to the lava, and would now have to climb down while trying to avoid all the cacti in the dark.  I did pretty well!  I only had a few spines on my shoe.

Salinas Pueblo
Mission Ruins

After camping in the shadow of a huge blob of lava, I headed towards north.  I stopped at the Salinas Pueblo Mission Ruins.  There were several, amazingly intact structures.  They were from the period when the Indians and Spanish were interacting in the 1600s.  It was so strange and powerful to see remains of bustling human interaction from so long ago in a place has very little human activity today! 

Petroglyphs

I kept heading north and ended up in Albuquerque.  I was lucky enough to have my own personal tour guide (my uncle) from afar.  He gave me many tips on what to do, see, and even eat!  It was lovely having a guide!  I went to the Petroglyphs National Monument.  It was amazing how may petroglyphs I was able to see in such a small space!  After examining the various designs on the rocks, I headed to Old Town.  The train station missed the town square by a bit, so the old downtown in much like it was in the 1700s.  It was fun to soak up the historic, southwest feel of the area!  Then, I ate a huge plate of this pork stew situation at Sadie’s.  It was totally wonderful, except for the fact that the male waiter (who was probably several years younger than me) kept calling me “sweetie” and told me I did a “great job” eating. . .weird and not okay!  After stuffing myself, I took a ride on the Sandia Tramway.  The tram goes from the north part of the city all the way to the top of the mountains!  It was beautiful up in the mountains!  I really enjoyed hiking around and finding different spots to enjoy the view!       

Church in Old Town

View of the Sandia Tramway

    

Dunes and Dwellings

White Sands National Monument in
New Mexico

I started off my day by stopping at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.    I took a few hikes through the gigantic gypsum sand dunes.  There are a few plants that can live in the dessert and gypsum sand, but as you get further away from the visitor center there are fewer plants.  When you get deep into the middle of the dunes, there is almost no vegetation at all.  All you can see is miles of rolling, snow white, dunes and the mountains in the distance.  It’s quite a beautiful, yet strange sight.  It’s as if you are at the beach in the desert!  Luckily, the gypsum doesn’t get very hot, so you can walk on the sand in bare feet even when it’s extremely hot!  The best part is that you can sled down the dunes!   That’s right. . .you can go sledding in the desert!  I had a blast climbing to the top of the tallest dunes I could find (they get about sixty feet tall) and sliding back down on my bright green sled!  I was able to get going pretty fast down several of the dunes!  I could be friends with the person who came up with this idea!  So fun!

My shiny green sled
on the dunes

After a most enjoyable morning of sledding, I took my sand covered self and got back into the car.  I started driving west.  I had a minor moment of panic when all the traffic on the interstate had to pull over for a border check point.  I was pretty sure I was on an east-west road, and there wasn’t much chance that I was about to accidently cross into Mexico, but the fact that everyone had to stop had me second guessing myself.  It turned out that I was safely on a road that was totally contained by the United States and it was just some random checkpoint.

Gila Cliff Dwelling
National Monument

I kept driving and it kept getting more and more beautiful!  There were mountains everywhere I looked!  New Mexico is quiet beautiful!  It is also very sparsely populated.  Things that looked like they would be fairly big towns on the map, turned out to be tiny.  In between the tiny towns, there is nothing except beautiful scenery!  As I started driving up into the mountains in Gila National Forest, I got even deeper into the unpopulated beauty!  The drive was slow since the road was winding its way up a mountain (with very few guard rails!), but extraordinarily gorgeous!  I even got to see two rainbows over one of the peaks at one point!  I found a campground about three quarters of the way up the mountain.  I had a lovely spot overlooking a ravine.  

Gila Cliff Dwellings 

The next day I kept driving up the mountain until I got to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.  After about a half a mile of hiking, I had a great view of several cave openings in the mountain.  After a little more hiking, I got to a park ranger who gave me a private tour of several caves!  She pointed out several pictographs and shared what little is known about the people who lived there!   It was amazing to realize that I was seeing remains of the dwellings from the 1200’s!  There was even some evidence that people had used the cave significantly before the 1200’s!  It’s totally amazing to be able to see remains of such ancient people and activity for myself!    

Exploring High Above and Low Below

Dr. Seuss-esque tree
at Carlsbad Caverns
National Park

After my adventures in Palo Duro State Park in Texas, I headed to southeastern New Mexico.  I stopped and ensured I had a spot to camp in the undeveloped section in Brantley Lake State Park.  I didn’t set up though because I was only twenty-five miles north of Carlsbad Caverns and I couldn’t wait to go!  The drive up to Carlsbad Caverns National Park was unexpectedly beautiful!  It takes about five miles of winding up beautiful, plateau-y mountains covered with various types of cactus and stunted palm trees that look like something that would appear in a Dr. Seuss book to get to the top where the visitor center is.  The parking lot has beautiful views of the Guadalupe Mountains!   I was too late to go into the cave that day, so I walked on the nature trail and then found my way to the bat amphitheater outside of the natural entrance to the cave.   At sunset every night in the summer, the thousands of bats that live in the cave during the day, fly out and go find bugs and moths to eat.  It was a most amazing sight to see a steady stream of bats come out of the cave for about forty-five minutes!  Some of them even flew right over my head!  It was strangely beautiful!

The bat ampitheater and view of the nature entrance to the cave at Carlsbad Caverns

Inside the cave!

The next day, I headed back to Carlsbad Caverns.  I was disappointed to learn that if you don’t’ have reservations for the ranger led tours six weeks in advance, you’re not going to be able to go on one.  Since I didn’t know I’d be anywhere remotely near New Mexico six weeks ago, I clearly didn’t have reservations.  However, you can walk through the natural entrance all the way to the elevator by yourself!   It was huge (and I know I only saw a small portion of it)!  It was amazing how far down I walked as I made my way through the cave.  It had an astonishingly magical feel to it.  The magical ambiance was especially strong in the largest room in the cave where there were tons of stalactites, stalagmites, and columns everywhere!  I was half expecting Harry Potter to come whizzing by on his broom! 

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

After strolling through the cave, I headed to Guadalupe Mountains National Park just over the border in Texas.  I set up my tent right at the foot of the mountains, then I headed for the trails.  I started hiking up towards the highest point in Texas.  It was a very steep and windy trail.  There were many chances for spectacular views of the mountain range!  I met a Japanese lady shortly after I started hiking.  She was very alarmed and disapproving of the fact that I was alone, she also told me it was much too late to make it to the top.    Luckily, she got distracted by a deer, so I was able to slip away without having to argue my case too much.  When I was pretty close to the top, I somehow got off the trail without realizing it.  What I thought was the trail kept getting steeper and steeper.  After a while, I had to start climbing.  After that went on for a few moments, I stopped and assessed the situation.  I wasn’t confident I was going to be able to safely get down, so I retreated.  As I retreated, I realized that even though the map did say strenuous, it didn’t seem likely that the national parks system would send random hikers up to climb their way to the top of a mountain without fair warning.  So, as I backtracked I started looking for the trail.  I finally found I the turn I missed and finished my hike to the top.   It was an excellent view of both the mountains and the valley below, but I didn't have too much time to soak it in since that Japanese lady was right, it was kind of late, although, that worked in my favor since it was really beautiful to see the fading sun reflect off the mountains as I made my way down! 

View from Guadalupe Peak (the highest point in Texas)

The next day, I decided that I hadn’t gotten enough of Carlsbad Caverns, so I headed back to take the tour again.  This was a great decision because it was the first Monday that most everyone was in school.  That meant that it was just me and about twelve retirees at the park!  It was so wonderful to get to wander around the cave when it was so quite!  It really added to the cave atmosphere!  I again, was swept away by the beauty and other-worldliness of the cave!  It’s so amazing to know that such breathtaking beauty exists even underground!  

Back inside the cave at Carlsbad Caverns!

The Last of the Beaches and the Start of the Canyons

Beach on Padre Island
in Texas

After leaving the spa in San Antonio, I headed for the last leg of my tour of the gulf coast.  I got to Padre Island just after noon.  I took a stroll on the nature trail.  There were several rolling dunes that were quite beautiful, but all the wildlife was hiding from the scotching sun.  Then I headed for the beach.  The water was wonderfully warm and the perfect cross between wavy and calm.  After several rotations between floating in the water and reading on the beach, I got motivated to move on.  I headed north and ended up in Mustang Island State Park.  I got to camp on the beach in Texas again, and this time no one tried to talk me out of it (I think it helped that the rangers were women).  This beach was a cross between the beaches on the gulf side of Florida and the one in Sea Rim State Park up by Port Arthur.  The water was a bright blue and was quite warm similar to Florida beaches, but it still had a sense of being at least somewhat untamed and wild.  Sitting on the beach and watching the waves, the sunset, and pelicans fly overhead was the perfect way to transition from the Aunt Martha’s spa to being back in the wild!

Mustang Island State Park in Texas

The next day I packed up my gear and headed north.  The plan was to head in the general direction of Amarillo until I got sick of driving.  When I stopped for gas, I looked at the map and realized that I could probably make it to a park outside of Oklahoma City by sunset (some of the parks have gates that shut at sunset). So, I headed towards Oklahoma.  I was almost to the state line when I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror.  For the first time in my life I was being pulled over.  I was a little perplexed by this since I was only going one mile an hour over the speed limit.  I gave the officer all the required paperwork then he informed me that he pulled me over because the plastic frame thing that goes around my license plate on the back of my car was covering up a small part of the plate that said what state I was from.  He did let me go with just a warning for this terrible offence.  Then he asked what brought me to Texas and we chatted about my trip for a while.  While it was mildly annoying that he pulled me over for such a silly reason, it actually really worked out because I had been concentrating on some less than pleasant personal matters before I got pulled over, and my run in with the law provided a perfectly timed distraction!       

Red Rock Canyon State Park
in Oklahoma

I continued into Oklahoma and was pleasantly surprised by how beautiful it was!  At first it was quite rolling, and then there were moments when I was high enough to see a great deal of land.  It still had the wild feel that Texas had, yet seemed a little less desolate.  I made it to Red Rock Canyon State Park around sunset, but it wasn’t gated, so I was okay.  As I slowly drove down into the park, I caught glimpses of lots of red rock and steep cliffs.  After laying claim to a campsite, I headed for the trail nearby.  After just a little way onto the trail, I was greeted by a gorgeous view of bluffs in the distance and an open ledge of bright red rock right in front of me.  I sat there and watched daylight slowly fade.  It was extraordinarily peaceful!     

After my detour to Oklahoma, I went to Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Texas.  It looks like it’s going to be a small park when you drive up to the visitor center, but soon after you drive past the visitor center, there is a scenic outlook that allows you to see a large portion of the canyon!  It’s breathtakingly beautiful!  The canyon is very large and reaches out in many directions.  The canyon walls have stripes of various colors based on what and where the sediments settled.  After gazing out at the canyon or quite a while, I made my way to the canyon floor to find my campsite.  After getting set up, I found a trail along the floor of the canyon.  There was not a bad view anywhere on the trail!  It was amazing to be surrounded by such steep and gorgeous canyons walls on all sides!  Next, I hiked from the canyon floor to the rim and back.  It was really fun to stop periodically on the trail and assess the various vantage points on the way up and down. 

Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Texas

A Week at the Spa!

The Alamo

After Austin I headed to San Antonio.  My first stop was to visit and have lunch with my Aunt Martha.  I was quite impressed by her new house and pool!  It was really nice to chat with her!  After lunch, I went to visit my friend Alicia.  It was so lovely to see and visit with her as well.  We had a most delicious dinner at Green, a vegetarian restaurant that had the most wonderful cupcakes ever!!!  It was great to get to meet her San Antonio friends too!  They even tried to teach me to two-step, but I was not too successful.  Apparently I bounce too much to perform this dance.  Also, why would you call a dance the two-step if it has more than two steps? 

Aunt Martha's fantastic pool!

The next day I headed back to Aunt Martha’s.  She had invited me to go to her Bible study/lunch group at her church.  It was a very pleasant afternoon and very lovely to meet so many kind women!  Afterwards, Aunt Martha drove down to the Alamo and I wandered around for a while.  It was way smaller than I thought it would be.  It also seemed a little strange that this historic site was in the middle of the city.  We headed back to Aunt Martha’s house and I enjoyed spending several hours in the pool!

Cool building in Gruene, TX

My other aunt, let’s call her Auntie, called me and asked if I wanted her to send me the books I had purchased and left at home since I thought I was only leaving for a week (a month and a half ago).  I said I thought that sounded like a great idea.  After packing them up and shipping them, she let me know that they would be there on Tuesday  (it was Wednesday).   I let Aunt Martha know and she said, “Oh good!  You’ll stay until Tuesday then!”  So, I was thrilled to be her unexpected and unannounced houseguest for about a week.  She was so kind and generous to share her home (I call it the spa though. . . it’s a most relaxing and luxurious home!) and time with me over the next several days! 

The Texas White House on the LBJ ranch

I really enjoyed getting to meet and play with Aunt Martha’s adopted nephews James and Joshua (as well as meeting their parents Michelle and Pete)!  I especially enjoyed seeing James play with his helium balloons that Aunt Martha filled with her very own official helium tank!  He was so cute running around with them.  He even cried out, “this is very serious!” at one point.  So cute!  I also had a ball playing with them in the pool!  I feel like the feeling might have been mutual since by the end of my time in San Antonio James was calling me Sister Sarah and Joshua told me he was going to come with me on my trip! 

Porch swing in the middle of nowhere
on the LBJ ranch

Aunt Martha and I had a few adventures in hill country.  She was kind enough to be my tour guide and take me to and show me around various German settlements in the hills outside of San Antonio.  It was very beautiful scenery and had a decidedly western feel about it!  She also took me to LBJ’s ranch.  It was fun to get to see a ranch for myself!  It was huge!  There were several very hot and tired cows and evidence of a stream, but the actual stream had dried up.  I also got to see the “Texas White House”.  My favorite part of the ranch though, was a porch swing that was set up in the middle of a field all by itself! 

Aunt Martha was also kind enough to indulge my curiosity about Morgan’s Wonderland.  I read about Morgan’s Wonderland in an adaptive newspaper I used in my classroom at PACTT.  It’s an amusement park that is totally accessible for people with a wide range of disabilities.  We went and had a most enjoyable afternoon!  They did a wonderful job making it totally inclusive!  I had to really look to distinguish which areas were wheelchair accessible and which weren’t!  We started our afternoon with an “off road” ride in a jeep.  It was a good chance to get to look around the park.  Then, I proceeded to check out every corner of the playground section!  I had a blast as a typically developing (I know some people may question just how typical I am. . .) twenty-seven year old, so I can only imagine how much fun it would be for a child who isn’t able to fully participate in most playgrounds!  My favorite part of the playground was the flat roller slide.  It was a flat table-like situation with rollers (like on roller slides) and there were bars above the table.  You lie down on the rollers then pull yourself through by using the bars until you come shooting out the other end!  Then we went to the sensory area.  That had a ton of xylophone, chime, and drum type situations of various sizes set up.  Next we walked past the swings.  There was a wide range of various levels of adaptive swings.  There were even ones that you rolled your wheelchair right on to and then you and your chair got to swing.  We were marveling at this when the lady asked Aunt Martha if she wanted to try it.  Since she’s up for anything, she said she did.  As a result, she got to swing for the first time in many years!  Next there was another playground area with a pirate theme by the water.  There was a fishing area out on the pier.  On one end of the pier, there were large water cannon gadgets that you could shoot off and aim for the floating, rotating, wind chime like contraptions in the water.  On the other end of the pier, you could steer remote control pirate ships.  There were a bunch of them, so you could crash into each other if you wanted!  Then we walked around the pond and through the various rest areas that each had their own country as a theme.  As we finished our tour we got to the best part!  The interactive water table!  There were various types of fountains in each section of the table.  The best part was you got to build or take them apart and decide how you wanted to manipulate the water!  It was so fun!!!  In addition to all this really fun stuff, the entire place was incredibly clean and the volunteers were all very pleasant.  I must say though, the most enjoyable part was getting to see the kids play their hearts out! 

Aunt Martha and a volunteer
in the swing area

I had the pleasure of getting to hang out with Alicia and her friends again, which lovely!  It was really nice to have some built in friends for a bit!  Alicia and I had time to have a low key night of Mexican food and a movie too.  I must say it was quite wonderful to have moments during my week in San Antonio to sit down and watch a movie or T.V. or just chat and just be still.  It was like a mini vacation from my vacation!        

Sensory area at Morgan's Wonderland

On Sunday, I had a realization of just how unstable my life is at the moment. I went to church with Michelle, Pete, and the boys.  At this point, I felt as if were (well Michelle and the boys anyway) all old friends by now since I had met them more than once.  I also felt like I had a pretty stable and established living situation since I had been sleeping inside in a bed for many nights at this point.  As Pete and Michelle were introducing me to their friends, I could tell by their reactions, that no, actually my being there was kind of random.  And now that I reflect on it, yes, it kind of was. After all, I am a random relative of a friend of their family that had they had met two days ago.  It’s strange how quickly I was able to adjust to living out my car in various parts of the country like it is totally normal! 

Interactive water table at
Morgan's Wonderland

I enjoyed my time in San Antonio immensely!  It was wonderful to get to know Aunt Martha better!  She was such a kind and generous hostess to an unexpected houseguest who stayed for a week!  She is one of the most flexible people I have ever met!  It was so great to both be on the receiving end of that flexibility as well as see it in action!  Nothing phases her and she consistently puts the people that are important to her first even if that messes up her plans (and she’s so effortless about it that you would never know that you disrupted her life at all!)!    

Funny sculpture in Gruene, TX

Adventures in Austin

After leaving Euless, I drove to Austin.  I walked around the grounds of the capital building and then ventured inside.  It is quite a beautiful building!  I was even able to join a tour that started right when I walked in!  I’m glad I did because otherwise I would not have learned that the Texas legislature includes all the grandchildren of the members who are twelve years old or younger on a poster with all their pictures that is posted near the doors and they call those grandchildren their mascots.  I was also quite entertained by the door hinges on all the doors in the building.  They are huge and brass and say “Texas Capital” on each side. . .just in case you forgot where you were.  After the tour, I wandered around some more.  I was headed up a flight of stairs when a rather overweight boy collapsed on the stairs in front of me and cried out, “This place has too many stairs!  Now I know why there are no fat politicians!” 

Door hinges in the capital building in Austin

A corner of the LBJ library

After leaving the capital building I went to the Lyndon B. Johnson library.  There were many interesting exhibits.  I especially enjoyed the section about his family.  They took a corner of the library, wallpapered it to look like someone’s house, then put up a bunch of family pictures in assorted frames to make it look like you were just going through their family pictures in their house.  There was also an animatronic LBJ standing by a section of fence and ready to tell anyone that walked by assorted funny stories.  While this would be strange enough if it had its own section, it didn’t really.  He was standing right next to a wall of paintings of all the presidents.  It was very peculiar to have something so comical next to something more serious! 

LBJ just waiting to tell
you a joke

After leaving the library, I went and got a hotel room.  I was excited to go find some good live music and had decided that I was going to get fancy for the event.  After getting ready I was horrified to realize that my version of fanciness  at this point in my life involves taking a shower and putting on jeans that go all the way to my shoes.  I took my fancy self with my clean hair and my jeans and drove downtown.  I drove around until I heard live music coming from multiple bars.  It really was a remarkable amount of music for a Monday night!  The first bar I went to had a band that was okay and a bunch of international students from the University of Texas that kept wanting to talk to me over the music.  When the band took a break I took it as my cue to move on.  I found what I was looking for on my second try.  The band was really good. . .the guitar player was pretty amazing!  I can get behind a city where you can randomly find amazing music by accident on a Monday night!!

The inside of the dome in the capital building in Austin, Texas