We packed up and loaded the car just as the roofers came to fix the leak we discovered our first night at the casita on the farm. A stop for coffee in town, and we headed east, with plans to stop a few places on the way. First stop was the overlook at San Augustin Pass between the San Augustin and Organ ranges.
We decided to see if the missile park and museum was open at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), where I had been stationed 48 years ago while in the U.S. Army*. The visitor center and museum were closed on Sunday, but the gate guards issued us a pass for the missile park, and we walked in for a brief tour of the collection of missiles and range instruments. The captured German V-2 rocket is now housed in a separate building that is part of the museum, so we weren’t able to see it. It may or may not be the same one that was in the park 48 years ago, exposed to the weather.
Another 50km across the missile range on U.S. 70, we pulled into the White Sands National Monument and did a drive-by of the dunes on the park road, then back on the highway, with a lunch stop in Alamogordo and a coffee and fuel stop in Ruidoso.
By now, it was getting late afternoon, and we pressed on across the eastern plateau, bypassing Roswell, through Portales, to Clovis. Motel Row in Clovis is next to the train tracks and downwind from a feed lot, but we’re getting used to trains and farm smells. There will be more over the next few weeks on the road.
*My job at WSMR was as a radio frequency interference analyst, resolving conflicts between civilian and military use of the radio spectrum to make sure civilian use didn’t interfere with range safety communications and tracking radars didn’t interfere with public safety communications in New Mexico and southern Utah. The perfect job for a Private First Class trained as an infantryman–or not–but, I had four years experience as chief engineer at an FM broadcast station, a bachelor’s degree in Physics, and six months training in computer architecture and programming before being drafted, and did some intense self-study of antenna theory and radio propagation theory my first couple of months on the job.
