9/5/17

So today is the day for heading east into the whack job world of Roswell! We left Las Cruches reasonably early and headed north east out of town towards Billy the Kid country (north east of Alamogordo). To get to Roswell you have to cross the White Sands Missile Range + the Holman Air Base… two of the prime suspects for most of the UFO sightings.

The missile range is everything you picture in your minds eye.. Huge craggy granite mountains (you know there are ICBMs and bunkers in them hills) and a big flat desert (no big cacti though!). You can stop at the missile range and actually go and have a look in their museum + at some of the old examples of missiles. Seriously took us more than 30mins to clear the security checks to allow us on to the base (even though that clearance is walk on only and the museum is only two blocks from the fortified front door and no metal detectors… I could have been carrying anything onto the base!)

So, we were in.. Very errie to be walking around looking at rockets and missiles. They are all proudly displayed outdoors with the craggy mountain range as the backdrop.. Very beautiful but very haunting.. White Sands is also the home of the atomic bomb. This is where Oppenheimer first detonated a nuclear device and is probably the location where all of those iconic photos of nuclear explosions were taken. Like I said, haunting. There is a whole museum dedicated to the might and power of the US military—to be honest, I didn’t take much of it in.. I found the whole experience disturbing. Don’t for a minute forget that the US has the largest arsenal of atomic weapons in the world… The photo of the patriot missile launcher probably sums it up best….

On a humorous note,I saw an alien space craft… Its actually a balloon holder for a rocket.. sure does look like a flying saucer (and as I said Roswell isn’t that far away) though!

So from the Missile range we continued east with our next stop being the White Sands National Monument (within the range actually—the range probably takes up 7-8% of the whole state of New Mexico).. As the name indicates it is full of white sandhills.. Well, sort of. Actually the “sand” isn’t sand but is gypsum. Gypsum is a mineral and is used in plaster and apparently in food.. we’ll eat 27lbs of it in our lifetime! (No, don’t ask me, I have no idea the conversion to kgs.. google it) We stopped and had morning tea with the backdrop of snowy white sandhills.. Actually, it was VERY bright.. you had to have sun glasses on.. so white and so bright! We could have sand tobogganed but we didn’t, we used the facilities (they seemingly stretched for miles with no-one using them) and then continued eastwards to Alamogordo and Billy the Kid country.

It took us a lot longer than we anticipated to move through the mountains behind Alamogordo (more Alpine mountains). We stopped in at Cloudcroft (8000ft) for lunch (absolutely FREEZING again!) and a little walk around but otherwise it seemed to take us forever to get to Ruidoso, the start of Billy the Kid territory.. BtK was another outlaw of the Wild West.. All started in a town called Lincoln (more of a ghost town today), where there were two main stores in town providing food and produce to the local military base at Fort Stanton (historic military base about 10miles up the road). A new comer to the town decided there was a duopoly in town and opened up some competition.. The competition lead to fighting between BtK’s employer and the duopoly owners. BtK’s owner was murdered, BtK and others retailatiated.. BtK was captured + actually escaped from gaol! (hence the fame). He later went on to commit other crimes and kill others but not related to this Lincoln war. The outcome was plenty dead, Lincoln became nearly a ghost town (from everyone fleeing the fighting) and bankruptcy to the duopoly.. All in all a great Wild West story!

By the time we’d gotten to Ruidoso it was late in the afternoon so we decided we’d stop in Ruidoso on the Apache Indian Reservation at the Casino and do a drive around the BtK country. The drive around enabled me to explain to you the history but otherwise was fairly uneventful. Lincoln is virtually a ghost town (the only thing keeping it alive is BtK tourists). The casino though was really well worth the stop. Most Indian Reservations in the US have casinos on them. Last time we were here in the US we never actually went to one (I mean casinos aren’t really my cup of tea).. this time we had chatted about giving one a go.. And so tonight being our last chance (Texas has no Indian Res’) we stayed.. And it was tops! Hotel was not that much more expensive than the usual run of the mill motels in the US.. Gorgeous view out over the lake, hot tub, steam room and sauna.. Four restaraunts, two bars + of course slots + tables.

So we grabbed a beer at the taproom (looked like fifty maybe on tap! the whole back wall was taps before gorging ourselves in the cheap but tasty buffet and then onwards to wannabe millionaires. Last time in Vegas M+I potted $700 so we were hoping it might happen again… It didn’t but we had fun losing our $10 on the Willy Wonka chocolate machine. M decided to go to bed, so D+I invested $20 each on the blackjack table. We both played for quite awhile before we decided to go and give 3 card poker a crack. We didn’t really have much of an idea how to play (the croupier was lovely and taught us as we went).. D was on quite the roll and we ended up $15 ahead.. We promptly spent that at the bar and then headed off to bed.

No Roswell today but aliens and weird stuff here we come tomorrow!