Van Horn, Texas

We left Lajitas on Tuesday and traveled to Van Horn, Texas.  We left around 11:00 am as we were hoping that all the roads affected by the cold spell would be warm and dry.  Sun shining and 45 degrees when we left and when we arrived in Van Horn it was 55 and sunny.  But as we were traveling through Alpine around 12:30,  we ran into a fog bank about 5 miles outside of Alpine and drove into a beautiful Silver Thaw that lasted until we got outside of Alpine about 5 miles.  I can say beautiful since the roads were dry and not icy, but it did get down to about 31 degrees.

We stayed two nights in Van Horn, in just a little overnighter campground called Desert Willow as this is not a very big town.  From Van Horn, on Wednesday we drove up to Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  It was really cold and windy, so we just visited the visitor center and did not see much - of course this part of the state is pretty dry and brown but there was a canyon area we would have loved to hike into.

The Guadalupe Peak is the highest spot in Texas at 8749 feet.  As always there is so much history that goes along with the parks, such as the Butterfield stagecoach route that went right through the park creating the first transcontinental mail route.

From there, we went onto Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.  Wow, what a beautiful cavern.  The pictures do not do it justice to show the size of the cavern or the details as it was quite dark in the cavern.  We took the self-guided trip with the audio system through the Big Room (8.2 acres).  It took about 1 1/2 hours to walk through the entire room.   It's amazing to see the results of nature over time and God's creation of nature's landscape, knowing it was created by the erosion of the area starting with the movement of a reef.  We took the elevator down 750 feet to the entrance of the Big Room.  There are over 100 caves that they have discovered in the area, but not open to the public.

Before leaving Texas, I wanted to comment on their road signage.  It's always interesting to learn each states different road design, signage, etc.  We got confused sometimes, especially with the GPS as to what type of a road it was, Interstate, Texas, FM, County Road, etc.  Many times we would just get the number of the highway and then we would have to figure out the type of road.

We were quite amazed at the markings for every damaged guardrail no matter how frequently traveled the roads were.  Every one was marked with a sign "Guardrail Damage Ahead" and some even got big orange flags to bring attention.  The other signage we thought was interesting was the "Bridge May Ice in Cold Weather".  This sign was on every overpass no matter how large the overpass was - guess they just don't get that much cold weather, except for the winter we spend in Texas.  Sometimes we would see 3-4 signs in one mile.  And lastly, we saw lots of roads that had dips in them and a sign posted "Watch for Water on Roadway" with the following marker.  Again, almost every dip was marked even if there were 3-5 in less than a mile. Luckily we only ran into one roadway with water over the road.

We were told that east of Van Horn is another good place to stop in Balmorhea.  Also Pecos is the place of the world's first rodeo - maybe next trip through.

On Thursday we traveled onto Las Cruces, NM.