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.

From our “base camp” near Las Cruces, we stopped at the Jeep dealer for an oil change, then ventured south into Texas for a day’s visit, where a granddaughter is a supervisor at a home health agency and a son is manager of a seafood restaurant.

Our granddaughter took us through the “old town” neighborhoods to a local coffee shop–across the street from a Starbucks, so it was a different experience for us. Very nice place. As we left to meet with our son, the wind blew up a fierce dust storm, followed by rain, and soon the steep streets on the slopes of the Franklin Mountains turned into fast-flowing streams. But, the rain soon passed to the south into Mexico, and the wind subsided.

We brought along some belated house-warming gifts for the El Paso crowd. Our son is also an accomplished musician, audiophile, and cinemaphile, and one of our grandsons is also a musician, so we had decided to pass on my vinyl recording collection from my disk jockey days in the 1960s, along with the turntable, so they wouldn’t just be wall decor, but could actually be played. Our granddaughter got my mother’s cookbooks and some hand-painted dishes that Judy and I had picked up in Montana when we lived there.

It was a good visit: our son had recently moved to El Paso with his job promotion; even though our granddaughter passed his restaurant on her way to work every day, uncle and niece had not visited until now. As our family matures and disperses, we seem to be the catalyst for family gatherings. Unfortunately for us, the number of cities we need to visit to see everyone is increasing.

To celebrate our family gathering, we went to the Cattleman’s Steakhouse at Indian Cliffs Ranch near Fabens, a long drive out of the city, but an amazing complex, with a huge sprawling restaurant, a zoo, and an old (1979) movie set to tour. The others enjoyed the beef for which the very popular eatery is famous, while the vegetarian in our group (me) dined on “trimmings,” which consisted of a baked potato and a side of awesome mushrooms cooked in wine, plus dabs of ranch beans and coleslaw and a biscuit or two, as the rest of our party ignored the bread to concentrate on the baked potatoes and beef.

Hmm, I may lose weight yet, as we continue into the heart of beef, pork, and chicken country. In the west, most restaurants have at least one meatless entrée, but here the “empty plate” is meant for sharing the generously proportioned slabs of meat with a child or elder. Indeed, Judy carried away a fair portion of her once-a-year steak in a take-out box.

As the evening drew to a close, we headed back toward New Mexico, in more rain, as we passed through a small storm cell in the dark. But, fortunately, the heart of this storm was headed northward and would pass our destination before we arrived. We were treated to a spectacular desert lightning display straight ahead. We turned off the freeway and cautiously dodged pools and puddles on the farm roads to our lodging, where we found the driveway freshly gravelled and our casita dry, the latter having withstood the heavy but brief downpour without overt leaks. Leaky roofs are a constant plague in the desert, where flat roofs are standard construction.

After a long day bicycling, visiting, and getting lost, we had a more relaxing day today, walking to the Plaza early and checking out shops to visit later. After a walk around the Basilica grounds, and our morning coffee, we walked part way up Canyon Road, always fascinated by the kinetic wind sculptures near the Tibetan shop. But, many of the shops were either not open or just opening for the day, so we headed back, stopping at coffee shop and travel literature bookstore and at weaving studio in one of the courtyards.

Later in the afternoon, after school, we drove out to our granddaughters house. Before dinner, we broke out a set of 8-sided kumihimo braiding disks we had made from craft foam after lunch, and taught the great-grandkids how to make a simple 7-strand cord, after which they taught their parents. Our grandson-in-law, a teacher, thought it would be good to have his students learn, to keep them occupied before class. We showed the older ones how to make bracelets by braiding a loop with seven threads, then folding and braiding doubled, 14 into 7 pairs, to make the cord, with a knot at the end to form a button. It was fun for all, as even the toddlers tried.