New Mexico – The Land of Enchantment

We LOVED New Mexico!! Stayed at 3 different State Parks. Each State Park was different, but all had immaculate facilities and landscaping and in quiet out of the way places with beautiful sunsets and star-filled skies! … and all were $8/night with hookups!!

Brantley Lake State Park – If not for the odd sign, it felt like we were just driving on a narrow road way out into the middle of nowhere. Then finally into our view comes this beautiful RV Park way out here in the desert! 😅

Next day we had a reservation booked at Carlsbad Caverns. We did the self-guided tour where we entered at the Bat Cave entrance and hiked down the 1.25 mile zigzagging Natural Entrance Route (see map pic below), down 750 feet to the bottom where there were actually rest rooms, a gift shop, and vending machines, even an elevator to take you back up! We did the loop walkabout at the bottom, around the ‘Big Room’ etc which is actually 8.2 acres descending another 100 feet to the deepest portion of the cavern. Took a few pictures, but again pictures in caves don’t at all accurately show what we saw! Every cave we’ve been in has it’s own twist on things and it’s always interesting to visit them all … this one was probably the most extraordinary one we’ve seen to date though!!

On route to our next campsite we saw this statue and pulled over to investigate. Turns out the statue was erected in memory of two cowboys (Goodnight and Loving) that mapped out a successful route to drive their cattle to market. The route was then named The Goodnight-Loving Trail and was the basis of the popular TV Series and 1985 best-selling book called ‘Lonesome Dove’

and another cool statue in a parking lot in Roswell was this one of Pat Garret – a famous law officer of the 1800’s, legendary for killing Billy the Kid in 1881

In Roswell we stopped by the Visitor Center and got our picture taken with the ‘photo-op’ aliens 👽 Visited the Museum, and found a few more fun photo-op things in town. Roswell certainly has embraced and capitalized on the whole UFO/Alien thing 🤣 The whole town was alien-themed! 👽 It was kind of hilarious … but good for a 1hr boot about stop anyways.

… and that was enough of Roswell … ‘bin there done that’ Haha 👽 … on to Bottomless Lake State Park for a couple of nights

Next day we took our bikes and went on an investigative ride about of the Park 🚴‍♀️ 🚴‍♂️

Then on route to our next stop we drove through the mountains and actually saw snow on the sides of the road! Then down into the valley to Alamagordo and toward White Sands National Park, we saw another roadside attraction and couldn’t resist 😅 I don’t think either one of us had ever eaten a pistachio out of a shell … or at least not for a really long time anyways. We learned some things about pistachio trees and bought a small bag of just plain roasted and salted. They were SO good, we went back the next day and bought two more bags twice the size in different flavours!

and then our last really great New Mexico campsite was at Oliver Lee State Park for our visit to White Sands National Park

White Sands National Park was about a 15 minute drive from our campsite. This stark pure white dune field is one of the rarest landscapes on planet Earth! Only a tiny handful of gypsum dune systems exist – and this is the largest of them. Astronauts can clearly see these dunes from space! 😳 Pretty cool 🤓 😎

The next day was sunny and much less windy so we decided to hike up this really great looking mountain in the Oliver Lee State Park we were staying at

The next day was the day we were leaving but it ended up being another clear, not too windy of a day so we decided to stop back into White Sands National Park for a second visit on the way out of town. It was great because we could actually see the mountains in the distance this day! … plus Joey wanted to go 🤣 We thought it was quite funny that they need to use a grader to keep the road cleared otherwise the blowing sand would just make the road disappear! 🙃

and one last roadside attraction on our way out of New Mexico