Toxic Waste, Freaking flood warnings, Sliding on sand

So yesterday’s drive from the Grand Canyon was not all that eventful other than a pit stop we made in Tombstone, Arizona.   Like a dumb ass, I left my charger and cord for my Iphone 5 in the hotel at the Grand Canyon.  I figured I could grab another one at Wal-mart.  So we head into the store, go back to the electronics section and find an overpriced replacement.

Before paying for it I had to hit the bathroom, while Cindy went to find some laundry detergent.  In the span of 60 seconds I saw no less than a half dozen people that belonged on peopleofwalmart.com.  The funniest of all was this gentleman.  Here is how I described him on Facebook.

Fumanchu mustache, short shorts, orange sneakers, mullet, tank top, beer gut, toxic waste tattoo on left arm – welcome to Tombstone Arizona.

The guy just looked incredibly ridiculous.  His toxic waste tattoo was just perfect icing on the cake.

On the way back out to the van we were passed by two guys driving what looked like a homemade dune buggy.  It also looked like it was ready to fall apart.  The driver mistook my stare as one of admiration and gave me a “yea, this shit is cool huh?” nod.  Instinctively I nodded back.

The rest of our driving day was long, longer than I would have liked.  We didn’t pull into Las Cruces until 9:30 PM local time.  We lost an hour along the way as we started out on Pacific time and wound up in Mountain time.

I can’t tell you how whacked out your internal clock gets when you are doing cross country road trips like this.  I have left the radio clock and GPS on EST the entire time.  It gives me a reference point to how screwed up my sense of time has been.  Last night we ate dinner at something like 11:30 est and it felt normal.

That dinner was take out from Cracker Barrel, something I only found was available when dad and I drove down to Florida in January.  The meal was good but heavy, not exactly what I like to go to bed with in my stomach.

I had a rude awakening around 4:30 am when I heard a sound I never heard before coming from my phone.  I stumbled out of bed and tried to focus on the screen.  It was a weather alert, similar to what you would see/hear on the radio or tv with the emergency broadcast system.  It was a flash flood warning.  I looked out the window and saw it was raining hard but did not see any floodwaters nearby, so I went back to bed.  I never knew they had the capability to do targeted emergency broadcasts to cell phones in a specific area.

Cindy and I slept in majorly, not getting out of bed until nearly 8AM.  This was ok because today was a scheduled light driving day.  We actually wound up staying at the hotel until nearly noon, waiting for laundry to dry.  It was ok though as it gave me a chance to get caught up on some computer work.

We pulled out and headed to White Sands National Park, a place I have been twice before with Ali.  I never get tired of seeing it’s snow like sand.

The weather heading to the park was very ominous.  It rained most of the way, only stopping a few miles before the entrance.  We also got to pass through our first border patrol checkpoint where you get eyeballed by some guy while he asks you if you are US citizens. You tell him yes and if he believes you, you can go.

When we went inside the building we checked out the shops.  I realized that the two prior times I was there I never went into the gift shop in the back.  I don’t recall if that was intentional because of having the dogs in the van or if we just missed it altogether.  The gift shop had a ton of cool things, including saucer sleds you can buy/rent for the dunes!

Cindy and I had been hobbling around badly all day.  The second day soreness from the epic Grand Canyon Hike was hammering us in a major way.  Despite that we had to grab a sled.  How many times do you get to sled in sand dunes in your lifetime?

The temperature in the dunes was dramatically less than my two prior visits when the thermometer was close to 100 degrees.  I don’t think it was even 80 degrees thanks to the overcast skies.

The white sand was much more compacted than I remembered, probably an end result from the monsoon rains of the last month or so.  I was bummed out that access to a huge portion of the park was blocked off because of the rainy weather they have been having.  Evidently they didn’t want vehicles on the non-paved roads if heavy rain was a possibility.  It meant we couldn’t get back to some of the really cool areas deeper in the park.

It didn’t matter much though, we parked the van and just walked deep into the park, looking for good dunes to sled.  It didn’t take long to find some.  We bought some wax to help reduce the friction the plastic sled would have on the sand, we reapplied it regularly although I don’t really know if it was needed.

Cindy has never seen snow in person in her life and she certainly has never sledded.  This was a very cool thing for her and she wasted no time trying out the sled, being the first one down a dune.  Once you got moving downward it really does feel like regular sledding although you slow down a lot faster when you run out of dune.

Cindy rode the saucer like a pro, not falling off once, even down some very steep sections.  I was not as fortunate, wiping out twice, including a funny head over heels flip on my last ride.

I compiled the phone video into a YouTube video if you want to see the fun.

It was not only great fun to sled the dunes, it was breathtaking to just take in the beauty of them.  The dark skies with angry clouds put a backdrop on the dunes I never had seen before.  I took a ton of pictures, many of which I am sure are going to be used in the future to decorate either my cyber or real living spaces.

We left the park just as it looked like the skies were going to open up.  I stopped back at the visitor center to grab a new window sticker to replace the badly weather beaten one that is on the van now.  The Grand Canyon and White Sands National park in a three day period is about as much of nature’s beauty that I can imagine,  such different and incredible places….

After the park we went to near by Almogordo to have an authentic Mexican meal at a place named Margo’s which was recommended by one of the White Sands employees.  The parking lot was empty when we arrived but probably it was due to the time of day, 3:30pm, right between lunch and dinner.  (more of our internal clocks being whacked)

We had the entire place to ourselves for awhile until another couple came in.  The food was great, the inside of the restaurant was charming, and all of the staff we dealt with seemed very friendly.  What a nice find.

The remaining drive to El Paso was thankfully short.  Cindy booked a room at DoubleTree which is the nicest hotel of any that we stayed in.  It’s too bad it is in a place like El Paso which I have long considered the armpit of Texas.

Tomorrow we will be getting up early and blowing out of here.  Tomorrow is the last brutal driving day of the trip.  I plan to cover the entire width of Texas in one day which is somewhere around 900 miles.  The mind numbing drive is made somewhat better by the 80 mph speed limit in much of west Texas but even so there is no way to avoid the suckage which will await.

I have had odd mpg numbers with the van.  The last three fill ups at elevation were showing my getting exceptional gas mileage, 17 mpg and even 18 mpg for one tank.  It didn’t make sense to me since it seemed the thin air was making the van work much, much harder to maintain speed.  Well this morning’s fill up calculated to an mpg in the high 14’s, the worst of the trip, I dont know why there is such a wild fluctuation.

The CEL did come back on yesterday and it was the same O2 sensor errors.  I cleared them with my code reader prior to the drive today.  It will be interesting to see the numbers the rest of the way.

I can pretty much write tomorrows blog entry right now, “We drove,a lot…”