Last Saturday we went south, planning to camp outside of Cloudcroft and then spend Sunday at the Hatch Chile Festival, our first camping trip since March.
Everything went awry.
At 11a, when our key lime Escape was still sitting at the base of the trailer steps, I knew it would be a trying weekend. We finally began the four or five hour journey at noon, and made our way past Los Lunas – which really does look like a moonscape – down I-25, and through the nothingness that is NM-380 east to Carrizozo – nothing but lava beds and rocky hills. On a hot day, it would be unbearable, but it is monsoon season and there was rain and clouds to shade all that empty space. The last leg headed south down NM-54 until Alamogordo, where NM-82 starts and heads east to the mountains, eventually dumping out in Nowheresville, Texas.
We hit Cloudcroft around 5:30p, the plan being to grab some hot dogs, buns, and beans at the local grocery store to cook over a nice, cozy campfire. I hopped out of the car in the rain (the temperature a whopping 52 degrees) and ran inside the General Store to find . . . nothing. Nearly every single shelf was empty, and this is no exaggeration. Unless we wanted a hearty meal of Mexican soda, gum, and postcards, groceries would have to come from somewhere else. The nearest supermarket was back 19 miles in Alamogordo, which would have been a relatively short drive and smart decision to make, but instead we decided to head up to find our bed for the night.
I am pretty convinced that every campsite within a two-hour radius of Cloudcroft was occupied for Labor Day weekend. Pesky holiday! – we had forgotten it. For the next four hours, we drove back and forth between Ruidoso and Las Cruces trying to find somewhere to sleep. To their credit, and uncharacteristically, the dogs were very well-behaved throughout the whole ordeal. We had no dinner, and no home. Homeless, homeless . . .
After being shunned from Aguirre Springs, White Sands, and the entire Lincoln National Forest – and being too cheap to try for a hotel – we ended up at Oliver Lee State Park, praising Oliver – whoever he is – and thanking our lucky stars that we wouldn’t be driving around all night. However, after fifteen minutes of attempting and failing to put the tent up in 40mph gusts of dusty wind, we had successfully beaten in one tent stake one-quarter of the way into the ground, and broken a second one. The camp host took pity on us and let us borrow a hammer and six superior stakes, which helped us manage to get the tent upright, if you can call it that.
We went to bed, an exercise that consisted of Boon scratching and climbing all over us in his futile attempts to break free of the collapsing tent; us alternately opening and closing the rainfly (opening when the wind threatened to pick the whole thing up like some neon yellow sail and fly us down to El Paso, closing when cold rain began pouring in); and debating whether or not to sleep in the back of the car. When it became very clear that Boon would absolutely not sleep in the middle of New Mexico’s first hurricane, we tumbled out, woke Annie up – as she had been asleep the whole time – set up our sleeping bags in the trunk of the car with the seats folded down, and proceeded to be eaten alive by sand fleas all night.
Strong wind destroy our home – many dead tonight it could be you . . .
I took two pictures all day, and they weren’t worth it. Sunday was slightly better.
To be continued . . .
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