LAS CRUCES, SI; EL PASO, NO

Wednesday, June 24 to Saturday, June 27.

Balmorhea is a nice park, with little ramadas at each site with picnic tables.  A stream, originating with the spring, runs through the park and is stocked with fish, some good sized.  Actually, smaller ones are in the pool, and if you stay still they come up and start nipping at your skin.  We kept moving.  They also have created a pretty nice wetlands area with tall reeds and other vegetation, and we spotted a big turtle, several water snakes, and some nice birds.  Sorry, Audubon, no identifications here. 

We took off and went west on I-10 to SR54 where we headed north to the Guadalupe Mountains national Park.  Nice drive with, natch, dramatic mountain vistas.   Didn’t stay at the park, but turned west on US62/180 towards El Paso.  Again, a beautiful desert drive, with storms dropping rain to the south, but not much of note to report.  Entering El Paso we quickly determined that we’d rather press on to Las Cruces.  From what we could see of El Paso, it is one of the more unlovely cities and, unless you wanted to go across to Ciudad Juarez (we didn’t), there was precious little to keep you there.  We had passed through Las Cruces on our AZ/NM trip last year, and thought it looked pretty nice.  Also, our friends Perry and Sara, who make frequent drives to L.A./Vegas, had a favorite restaurant there.

This turned out to be a good call.  Our AAA Camping guide had several choices, but one was quite close to the restaurant, so we chose it, the Siesta RV Park.  This is an excellent park, and is within walking distance of the old town portion of Las Cruces, called Mesilla.  Think of a lower-keyed Santa Fe, with a nice town square fronting a very nice mission church, which we photographed at night.  After setting up and getting the A/C going, we walked to Mesilla and found the restaurant, La Posta, right on the square.  This place has been in operation for 80+ years, and is in a building even older with a series of rooms with eclectic, to say the least, decorating.   They make a number of Margueritas, including “authentic” ones that use only fresh lime juice, no sweet-n-sour mix.  That was my choice, with special tequila and Cointreau.  Oh, yes.   The food was typical everything-covered-with-sauce-and-cheese, and plenty of it, but did have some good flavors peeking through.  Good chips and salsa.  After dinner we strolled around and found a little theatre that was run by a nonprofit group, showing “The Great Buck Howard” starring John Malkovich (sp?).  Five rows of seats, with tables and chairs behind for eating while you watch, and a lady to introduce the evening’s entertainment.  Loved it.

Thursday we unloaded the scoot, gave it a sponge bath, and went off to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum.  This is a fairly new facility, with some parts still under construction, and demonstrates ranch operations.  Some schoolkid groups were there, so that made the milking demonstration more fun, as well as the bottle feeding of the orphaned “brangus” (brahma/angus) calf which was growing 50% faster and larger on its diet of Holstein milk.  We got a private cart tour of the various pens and stables with a grizzled cowboy guide, and his enthusiasm for the various types of stock was infectious.  There was an unique cutting-torch metal diorama that this picture only captures a portion of.  After that we went inside to view the exhibits, which had some great displays of southwestern history and life.  Loni got sidetracked by a woman who had been giving the kids a demonstration of quilting in the lobby.  Her samples were really beautiful, and they ended up talking for a quarter hour.   Loni liked the saddle teeter totter in the kids playroom.  This definitely is a good stop.  After we had finished, we debated scooting on up the the White Sands Missile Museum, but the wind was blowing and gusting pretty strong, and it would be a 25 mile trip each way.  We opted to go back to Mesilla and look at the shops.  Most were the usual touristy junk, but some had some nice artwork and house stuff.  We actually spent some buckos on a metalwork sculpture and a rooster lantern.  What?  I’ll have to post pictures, but they’re all wrapped up at the moment.  Next morning (Fri), we took our power walk through an adjacent residential neighborhood and admired the xeriscape varieties of the front yards.  Adios, Las Cruces, we enjoyed our stay.

We took I-10 (ugh) west to US 180 and turned NW, over the local Continental Divide,  towards Silver City, which was billed as a former mining town turned art center.  Well, it was a mining town, and boyhood home of Billy the Kid, as they remind you at every turn.  the drive up 180 was again scenic, with the mountains looming, but I wouldn’t go out of my way again to visit Silver City.  It’s a collection of old and reconstructed buildings, precious few of which are worth much to look at, with much boarded up and out-of-business enterprises.  I realize we are here in the off season (only mad dogs and Englishmen . . .), but this place felt dead.  And nearly all of the shops that are still in business close up at 4:00.  We found only one shop with anything to look at.  The best part of the town was its “river walk”, which stretches for 3 blocks along the former site of the town’s main street, which was washed away in some 19th century flood, resulting in the relocation of everything.  The other good thing was the RV park, which is right in town, was neatly maintained, with good shade trees.  Another gold star.  It even had high entertainment as we watched some poor guy towing a long horse/human combo trailer try to parallel park it behind our rig.  We lost count of the forwards and backwards.  He kept making the same mistakes over and over.

Before settling on that park, we had thought we would try to do some dry camping up in a state park north of town on SR15, towards the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.  However, about ten miles up the road the signs warned that the road narrowed, with no center stripe, and it was dangerous for vehicles over 20 feet in length.  That’s usually an exaggeration, but the road was so narrow that we got concerned we might get in a situation where we couldn’t turn around if needed, so we bagged it and opted for in-town.  Too bad, as the local promos show the area we were heading for to be quite lush with pines and lakes.

We also thought we might stay another day and use the scoot to go up that mountain road to the Monument.  That was squelched by the first steady, albeit light, rain of our trip.  It started that night and was still going on Saturday morning, so we called it quits and quit Silver City.