Mar 28 Mon - White Sands National Monument

Mar 28 Mon Day 70 windy, sunny, hot, (81 F)

After breakfast Sheila & I decided that she would take the car & the GPS as she wanted to check out Siesta RV Park close by. Then she would get some gas for the car, maybe shopping if time and she would meet me at Veterans Memorial Park. I would get gas & fill up the propane tank on the RV. Out Coachlight @ 10:15. I put gas in at 137746 km but didn’t fill it as the gas pump read 96 octane not the 97 that the RV requires, I didn’t notice till after I started, I put in 20 gallons to mix with the 97 octane gas in the tank. Then I went to the propane station. Propane here is $3.37 per USG compared with $2.43 in CA. I left propane stn at 10:40. As well I also stopped at an ATM & got out more cash. It’s weird though, this time the fee to withdraw was $ 2.68--how do they come up with odd numbers like that? Away bank at 10:50 and I arrived at the Veterans Memorial Park at 11:10. At the memorial I took several pictures of brass plaques they had commemorating all USA wars from the 1776 revolution all the way to Desert storm. The plaques gave a brief history of each war, how many were involved & how many casualties there were. The info on each war was presented in a very informative and even- handed way, I was impressed. Sheila finally showed up an hour after I got there and we pulled out at 12:10. She had been told the park was across the street from Vista Middle School and so plugged that school’s address into the GPS so it took her there. “There” was nowhere near the memorial park. She went into Vista school, & with the secretary’s help found the school it was near, but not across from. When she arrived at that school & still couldn’t find the park she had to consult that school’s secretary who said it was a mile east on Roadrunner Ave. With all that consulting, she didn’t arrive at the memorial until an hour after I did. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought to take a map of Las Cruces with her, so was totally dependent on the GPS which didn’t have a listing for the memorial. She said she thought she was going in the wrong direction the first time, but couldn’t prove it without a map. Very frustrating!

We found space to hook up at 12:20, in a church parking lot, & drove to the White Sands National Monument (est. in 1953), arriving at 1:15 @ 137839 kms. After a quick lunch in the RV, we went to the Visitors Centre--several very attractive adobe bldgs connected by an inner courtyard. After watching a 17 minute video on this park in theTularosa Basin which is part of the Chichauan Desert, we went on the 8 mile drive into the gypsum sand dunes area. They are really white and when we walked on them they were quite firm, way more so than ordinary sand. Also, even tho the temp. was in the 80’s, the sand was not at all hot to the touch. The gypsum is dissolved from rocks by rain & snow & washed down from surrounding mountains into the Tularosa basin but it has no rivers that drain it so the water slowly evaporates and deposits the dissolved gypsum as selenite crystals – some up to 3 feet long. Nature eventually breaks these crystals into sand-sized grains which are then blown by a strong SW wind to form sand dunes, some as high as 50 ft. They are quite a sight and the sand grains are really fine, way more so than regular beach sand. As the SW winds continually blow on these dunes, they move more & more sand to the leading edge of the dune where it topples down moving the dune forward by a few feet each year. As a result many plants in the area between the dunes are covered up & die, though some, like the animals adapt & survive. We finally left the sand dunes at 4:40 and arrived at Edgington RV Park just north of Alamogordo at 5:15 at 137872 km. They have a club house area with a satellite TV so Sheila got to see her Dancing with the Stars. I put the aerial up & we get 2 digital channels crystal clear on the RV TV, Fox & some channel called Cool TV.