Today we did exactly the same mileage as yesterday, 502 km (312 miles) and it was another good drive plus we didn’t have the winds of yesterday and Sunday afternoon. Actually, John did our mileage for yesterday and it was 16.4 miles/gal so we won’t complain about the tail wind, and that is actually figuring out the mileage rather than just doing the truck reading.
Today was all back roads and the drive over the mountain from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft was really pretty, a bit slow because of the hump over the mountain and the twisty, turny road, but once we cleared Cloudcroft it was clear sailing with good roads and very little traffic.
Tunnel Through the Mountain
After Artesia, NM we were on new territory for us and it was an interesting drive as after Artesia it was all oil land – over a hundred miles of nothing but oil rigs and transformer stations feeding the rigs. Then we were into farming country and it appears that most of it is cotton, as we passed about four cotton gins. There were some areas with cattle and all the way to Big Spring, TX there were oil drilling rigs but they had thinned out a bit from what we had seen earlier.
Just outside of Hobbs, NM we went through about 2 miles of land that was totally burned and it must have been quite recent as we could still smell the smoke, pretty devastating looking!
Burned Out Area
Entering Texas
Just as we got to Big Sprig we saw a huge wind farm on the horizon so guess they are harnessing the wind in this area, it is nice to see them taking advantage of the wind rather than using irreplaceable resources.
Today we lost another hour in time, yesterday we lost an hour as New Mexico is on Mountain Time the same as Arizona, but NM does daylight saving time so we lost an hour as soon as we came into NM and today when we came into Texas we went on Central time, thank goodness that is the last time change until we are almost home as 2 hours in 2 days is hard on the system. The one bonus though is that we are now only an hour difference from home instead of three hours.
Tonight we are at Whip In RV Park at Big Spring, not a great place but at under $20/night we can handle it for one night. I am not sure of our destination for tomorrow, that is my next job to figure it out so you will have to come back tomorrow to see what our day was like and where we got to.
As always, today was another great gift of a day in the sunny south and we look forward to another good day tomorrow.
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