Thursday:   Fort Stockton Texas to Socorro New Mexico

Sunrise this morning wasn’t until 7.45am; I was much further west than yesterday but still in the same time zone.

As I drove north from Fort Stockton the landscape was flat and the road was straight, very straight; I think at one stage there wasn’t a corner for 30kms.

As I crossed into New Mexico two things happened; I gained an hour as NM is an hour behind Texas and the speed limit dropped 10mph.

There were oil drilling rigs everywhere and oil pumps constantly turning. If you pay attention to the financial news then you will usually hear two oil daily spot prices quoted; Brent Crude (oil from the North Sea) and West Texas Intermediate (oil from right underneath where I was driving today). There were lots of tankers on the road, collecting oil from many small wells and taking it to a nearby town to be shipped by rail or refined (Artesia has an oil refinery).

I stopped at Carlsbad for late breakfast / early lunch.

Driving out of the town I saw a sign to the Living Desert State Park; if you every want to see a lot of cacti then this is the place to visit. There was also a ‘zoo’; which consisted of a lot of animals asleep because by 11am it was 35C. I was the only visitor; although a family arrived with their poodle as I was leaving; it didn’t look like a seeing-eye poodle so I’m not sure how they were going to get it inside.

I continued north; just before Roswell there was a sign “Warning to Drivers; do not pick up hitchhikers here as the Roswell Correctional Facility is ahead”. I didn’t have to be told twice, and anyway my car was full of hitchhikers I had picked up outside the Carlsbad Correctional Facility an hour before.

Roswell gets a lot of bad press because of its connection with the Roswell Incident, which was a report of an object that crashed near Roswell in 1947, allegedly an extra-terrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants. It is a much larger town than I imagined and there are very few references to aliens; although I did see a UFO Museum in an old movie theatre; I didn’t stop. If aliens are so advanced and can make it all the way across the universe to Earth then why do they always kidnap the intellectually challenged, the paranoid and the plain mad? Poor judges of character despite having figured out interstellar travel?

I headed west from Roswell and mountains appeared and the road began to climb. At Hondo I turned off the main road and drove through a series of valleys until coming out to a very wide valley where the road is the northern boundary of the White Sands Missile Testing Range. About 15kms south of the road is the spot where in 1945 the first atomic bomb was detonated. The spot is open to visitors on two days per year; unfortunately the second day for 2012 is in about three weeks (visitors are only allowed to remain for a hour because of the residual radiation; who cares? How many places can you visit where you’ll glow in the dark when you get home).

Socorro is almost on the west bank of the Rio Grande River; which I drove across about 10kms south of Socorro; the river appeared to be dry but there must be some water in it somewhere as the fields for a couple of hundred meters on the west side are very green, in contrast to everywhere else.

Forgot to take my camera to dinner; but a recorder would have been better. I had steak, which led to the following exchange:

Waitress: Roast Potato, Mashed or French Fries?

R: Mashed

W: Brown or white gravy on the mash?

R: brown (white gravy sounded a bit strange; I saw some on another diner’s plate and it did look strange)

W; Soup or Salad?

R: Salad
W: bowl or plate?
R: plate (what difference does it make?)

W: Dressing, thousand island, ranch, French, Italian, blue cheese or oil and balsamic?

R: thousand island (which looked and tasted like Italian)

Having had such a great night at the Motel 6 in Fort Stockton I happily pulled into the driveway of the Socorro Motel 6; last night was $56, tonight is $36; for exactly the same room, it looks like they raced my room from last night here on the back of truck and installed it just before I arrived. The TV in this room has exactly the same problem with the remote control as the TV last night.