New Mexicana

It feels like we are now really entering the heart of the Great American Road Trip!

When you feel like a nut…

Pistachio ice cream eating at Alamogordo Pistachio Land before noon ✅

The most delicious scoop of pistachio ice cream loaded with pistachio nuts. This is an important rite of passage learned from a trailblazer before us (thanks, Cambria!).

Steve looking cool and thoughtful as our shoes fill up with white gypsum.

Hiking around the dramatic and highly photogenic White Sands National Park ✅

One scene out of what seemed like a million abstracted movie sets.

Taking the natural entrance (a spiraling walk down one and a quarter miles, equivalent to 75-80 floors) into Carlsbad Caverns and then ogling around in amazement for another mile and a quarter in this sprawling cavern ✅

Steve has wanted to visit here for 60 years! I still have the dusk bat flight from the cavern on my list (where a million bats fly out together for the night)–although we did get to see “the dayshift” where swallows circle in and out of the “Devil’s Den” entrance, and you can hear their songs as you descend.