New Mexico to Yoakum County TX, starting towards home

About 9am today, we decided to start home. That won't surprise some of you at least. 😃  It sounds like a decent weather window for heading north.


There's the odd Texas longhorn around, even though this is New Mexico:

You Southwest travellers will no doubt recognize this bird:

The Roadrunner is in a rest area just west of Las Cruces NM, only accessible from the eastbound lanes of I10. The rest area itself is gorgeous, and an award-winner:

There are a number of these gorgeous stone shelters

As we crossed to Alamogordo NM, the famous White Sands started showing up. The sand is really gypsum, but behaves like sand, complete with wind-blown dunes:

Here's a use for all those wine corks you might be saving. This was at the World's Largest Pistachio Nut farm at the north end of Alamogordo NM:

It's an exciting drive from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft NM at 8,600 ft elevation, lots of climbing and sharp curves, easier with the van than with an Airstream trailer in tow (right J&C?):

Some beautiful colours along the way

We were surprised to see hundreds of these pumping rigs east of Artesia NM. I think they were mostly natural gas, since they had compressing stations periodically:

 These went on for literally 50 miles or so along the highway, and most times as far back from the highway as we could see. It sure smelled like an oil patch.

Tonight we're camped (for free, so far) in the Yoakum County park, where a large birthday party was in progress:

There's even several electric hookups, although we didn't connect to one tonight.

 
Here's the travel map for today: