Goal: Whites City, NM
We spent an hour and a half this morning doing spring trip home planning while we had our breakfast and coffees. Still lots of ideas about what we might do for the return trip in the spring. No reservations or commitments yet. Part of the reason is that while we have had a few cold nights in the RV, nothing like a number of nights below 30 degrees yet. In addition, many northern US camping areas do not open until after certain dates, like 4/15 in many Pennsylvania parks, or May 1 in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. As a result the planning the spring trip home is taking a lot of effort.
We were able to break camp today by 10:43 am, the process took us 45 minutes.
The first town we drove through on our ride south towards Carlsbad, is the tiny town of Dora. Dora is a wide spot in road; 1 gas station, 1 school, 1 general store. The town obviously serves for the ranches located outside of town.
The road was quite rough with that “off the plains” head wind. Clyde didn’t have any real problem with the wind, but we and the cats noticed that the trailer wagged a bit more than it usually did. Tigger was particularly vocal as she expressed her displeasure of the rough road. Luckily that didn’t last too long.
On the sides of the road were numerous hay fields broken by acres of cactus dotted grass land. On the grass land we would see occasional Angus beef cattle grazing or hunkering down in a slight dip of land.
Just south of Dora there was a huge number of wind turbines. At least 90 percent of the turbines we saw were spinning with today’s strong winds. We discussed the economic advantage the ranchers in this area must be having because they leased out a part of their land to wind farming, in addition to the benefits to the electric generation of the area.
To give you some idea of how much and gusty the wind was blowing today, we saw a number of large tumble weeds dance across the highway in front of Clyde. Deryl saw several that not only cross the divided highway, but upon reaching the fence on our side of the road, jumped the fence!
We drove through another tiny town which has as its claim to fame the “Lesser Prairie Chicken Capital”. Other than the sign on the one out building there was one small “general store” which appeared to be closed.
In general the day was around 63 degrees Fahrenheit with gentle wind and sunny.
The next town we reached was Tatum New Mexico. Tatum is a small but lively town. The center is the cross roads between NM 206 & US380 which is the east/west road to Roswell. We put 10 gallons of diesel into Clyde as CYA. The prices for diesel have been variable all, some towns very high, others lower.
The town of Tatum was interesting as there were these lovely cut steel signs for street and town markings on every corner.
We continued south on NM 206 to the town of Lovington. Along the way there were lots of the old wind power water pumps for occasional cattle pool. It was interesting to see that some of the water pumps are now using solar panels to provide the power for the pumps instead of the old windmills.
Turned on to US 82 toward Lovington
Just south of the town of Lovington, we changed the road name to NM 483, but continued our southerly direction. Lovington is a larger town with a hospital, and oil field services. This route took us past an enormous electricity generation facilioty called the Cunningham Generation Station, owned by Xcel Energy.
Shortly after the Xcel Energy plant we turned west on US 180, in Arkansas Junction. The junction is really more the intersection of the two highways, than a town.
As we drove South West on US 180, we passed the sign for a WIPP site, with a large factory like building off in the distance. What the heck is WIPP? We didn’t know until Deryl researched it on the internet. WIPP stands for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. It turns out to be the nation’s only deep geologic repository for long-lived radioactive wastes. Glad it was far off the road!
Shortly after passing the WIPP site, the cats both started voicing their displeasure. Quickly we realized what they were complaining about. The air took on an acrid and unpleasant aroma quickly. About that time is when we saw the signs for the Potash mine and processing plants. In addition the other side of the highway had what appeared to be an oil refinery. Between the two industries, the air quality as down at the nasty level.
Deryl did research Potash, and learned that it is used in fertilizer, and that this area near Carlsbad is one of the world’s largest pit mines in the world. It has a lot of very high quality Potash that is easy to extract.
We kept driving and didn’t feel a need to investigate further than the internet article. The good news is that there was absolutely no stop lights or signs which caused us to stop, therefore we were quickly past this industrial area.
We arrived in Whites City around 2:30 PM. Whites City is not much of a town. It is however, just before the entrance to the Carlsbad Cavern National Park. The open businesses are a gas station, the RV Park, and a merchandise shop (selling mostly tourist junk). The other businesses in town were a restaurant, a water park, & a motel. It is hard to tell given the condition of all the buildings, if the closed businesses, died or are just seasonally closed.
The staff in the merchandise shop also handle the RV checkin and reservation process. Luckily we were the first in line to check in as a group of campers arrived just after us.
Our site was up on the road level, and we did not have to navigate the steep dirt road down the ravine, and up the other side to the other campsites. Our site had water, 30 amp electric, and sewer, therefore we had everything we needed. Rob and I proceeded to make our dinner and settle in for the night.
Some time shortly after we finished eating, a large Class A motorhome pulled into the slot next to us. We watched as a guy was hooking up his power to the pedestal, and could tell this was new to him. Being social and helpful folks, we took the remainder of our drinks outside, and offered some advice about how to hook things up.
It felt nice that we could help out these new RVers. It was two families vacationing together. Two brothers and their families had rented this large Class A motorhome and were traveling to visit their mother and grand mother for Thanksgiving. They unfortunately had no clue about what they were doing, and had not really made much of a plan. We overheard one of the teenaged girls asking their father, where the McDonald’s restaurant was in town. (The nearest fast food restaurant is 25 miles north of Whites City in Carlsbad City! Ah the joys of camping.)
Once they had all their services connected, we left them to figure out dinner, and we returned to the trailer for the night.