Aliens!!

I believe in aliens. It's impossible not to when you have a 16 year old spending every waking moment convincing me of their existence along with the zombie apocalypse. He has the whole end of the world thing down to a science and the rest of us working on rounding up his wagon train.

Our first stop was at Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, or close by. We brought our own spray paint (we saw the Duggars do the same thing, yep, I'm smart like that) yet there were many extra cans laying around. Kristian had a heyday laying his art down. The best pics of all of us are on my Sony which means I'll have to treat you all to a slide show someday.

 

Next was a 4ish hour drive to Roswell. Interesting. 4 hours of the drive were absolute desert, nothing, cows, smells of cows, more cows, fart jokes and a 5 foot long dead snake at the picnic area. With not one drop of water in site, Durango was pulling like a champ, but we watched the temps climb from 74 to 99 and there was definitely a bit of silent fretting yet Kristian was in awe of the lack of scenery. For the last 30 minutes, after driving through Roswell where painted & mâché aliens (like the Cincy pigs and Chicago cows) are everywhere, we climbed a big grade about 7 miles out of town that made the Durango sweat, then winded down into a creepy ghost town of an area. How shocked we were to see this national park called Bottomless Lake. 90 feet down in center.

 

Story goes that cowboys used to tie their saddles and let them sink to see how deep. It's clear due to the minerals and you can swim out a good ways and see straight down. We all celebrated Kevin's great planning and driving skills by swimming in he lake and then a few icy cold Dos Equis. (The Lone Star was long gone)

 

For the second time in ten years, we were blessed with incredible camping neighbors! They were a couple that lived in Albuquerque and were just enjoying some quiet time. Kids grown, they gave us patient directions to our next expeditions and offered suggestions so kindly. They got Kristian so super excited about our next few stops that he actually crawled out of bed with only two prompts The last time we met a couple like this, Catherine and Jim, in OBX, we followed their blog for over a year. They also camped in a pick up with camper cab and both dudes played great guitar. Hmmm, crazy cool karma. We returned from Roswell to a sweet note from Barb & Martin to let them know how our travels go. LOVE people like that!!