6 May 2024 – Trip Day 36 – by Alan
Today we went to White Sands National Park, but first let’s catch up on a few things!
The RV we are staying at has a number of these type of shelters. They seem to becoming very popular in the southwest.
This morning the kitchen sink backed up as we were cleaning up after breakfast and getting ready to go. I checked the tank valves – usually my trick is to forget to open one of them and then we spaz out about having a clogged drain somewhere. Well, the valves were open but there was a small trickle of water coming out.
I closed the other valves to the other gray tank and hooked up my flush hose to the back flush valve on my sewer adapter. I opened the valves and back flushed the gray tank for about 30 seconds and then opened the drain gate. I saw a lot of chunks and debris come out of the drain, followed by the rest of the water in the gray tank. After that, it drained normally. Except that I forgot to reopen the rear gray tank valve, which backed up during the kid’s showers. Easy enough to fix, but irritating. After our plumbing adventures, we headed out to the Park.
We got the kids Junior Ranger vests, so now they are fully kitted out.
We picked up the Junior Ranger books and headed out to do a hike on the Dune Nature Trail. It was a windy day and a lot of the sand was being kicked up.
The road into the park was closed past the Nature trail parking lot due to a F-16 crash that happened previously.
All of the visitors were packed into this small parking lot. It was fairly packed when we arrived.
Kitted out, we started out on the trail.
The trail had various signs describing the wildlife and they were tied into the Junior Ranger program. However, a decent number of the signs were sun faded to the point of being unreadable.
Posing on a crest for a photo with the blowing dust in the background, the kids did well in the soft gypsum sand of the dunes. The dunes can move as much as 30 feet or more in a year.
We came across this Cottonwood tree, which from the looks of it, had been buried at one point.
We came across this little guy crawling on the sands. Upon further investigation, we found that he must have been blown off the Cottonwood tree.
A nice gentleman passing by took our family photo; he mentioned that he came from a family of 6.
Despite the harsh environment, desert flowers were blooming.
After our hike, we drove back to the Visitor Center and turned in their Junior Ranger workbooks. The kids happily added another badge to their collection.
Afterward, we drove back to the campground but we stopped at the https://pistachioland.com/worlds-largest-pistachio/.
In keeping of the tradition of roadside attractions, we sampled their ice cream.
Evan and Arya were not fans of the pistachio ice cream, but Garrett and Jarek didn’t mind.
Tomorrow we are back on the road, headed to Arizona.
257 miles tomorrow with a mountain range to get over, then an over night and a shorter drive to Tucson to get Big Country’s slide out fixed.