Trip to Cloudcroft

View of White Sands from 8000ft

Downtown Cloudcroft

This morning was sunny but cold, only about 36F at 7:30 a.m. Gordon went out before sunrise to photograph the White Sands again but I got a phone call late in the morning from him indicating that White Sands National Monument was closed this morning for missile testing so he had gone to the Dodge dealer in town to get our service done so that’s out of the way for a few thousand miles.

When he got back we got ready and drove to Cloudcroft. It’s a small town about 16 miles away from Alamogordo but that 16 miles takes us from 4500 ft to over 8000 ft. I had heard that Cloudcroft was a cute little town with all kinds of shops. It wasn’t as cute as I had expected and while it did have some shops, some were also closed. It had snowed there recently as was evident more outside the town that in the town itself however some of the sidewalks were very slippery.

When we got back we stopped at the Visitor Center and found out that Hwy 54 which heads toward Albuquerque is a decent road so rather than returning to Las Cruces to pick up I-25, we’ll take Hwy54 to Hwy380 which will take us to I-25, a distance of about 209 miles. We haven’t made a final decision yet on returning to Ohio by going through Albuquerque but it looks like the weather at least in that area is good next week.

On our travels around Alamogordo, we found another adobe double wide modular home so we stopped in to see it today. It’s exactly the same as the one we saw near Benson a couple of weeks ago, made by the same company except it’s $80,000 not $109,000. Quite a difference! However, we’re still not sure what we’ll be doing down the road so right now it’s just looking.

When we got back I settled down to my book and a nap and Gordon went out to White Sands again for sunset. He was quite happy with his photos. His White Sands Gallery can be found here: http://www.pbase.com/merriwolf/79th_camp_white_sands

That about sums up today’s events!