back to Texas

After a long day of driving, we find ourselves back in El Paso again, enjoying the hospitality of CY once more. Tomorrow morning, we'll depart early-early and drive to Corpus Christi, where the cats have been vacationing (at the Resort d'Mom).

As it happens, we didn't get to do two of the things we really wanted to do today. The plan had been to see the Gila cliff dwellings, but those wound up being a much longer drive than we had anticipated. We drove along the curvy mountain road until we were at about 7,500 feet in altitude, and then we realized there were 22 more miles to go until we got to the cliffs, so we turned around and went back through Pinos Altos and Silver City to get to I-10. Along the way, we did see some lovely pine forests with snowfall up on the mountain.

After our fruitless trip up the mountain, there wasn't enough time to get back to White Sands by 4pm. When we were there last week, we noticed that they had a sunset hike through the dunes, and we had wanted to go along, but it wasn't really possible within our time constraints today. If we'd known the Gila cliffs weren't going to happen, we could've rearranged our schedule. Next time, we'll know.

What we did do this morning (besides drive a lot) is go to the Saguaro National Park near Tucson. It was the only good thing about Tucson, as far as we're concerned. There were all sorts of cactus there besides the saguaro, as well as birds and other wildlife we hadn't seen before. We saw a pair of coyotes running along the roadside on the way to the park and a rabbit inside the park itself, and of course, we took a bunch of cactus photos. My favorites, of course, were the ones with C posing alongside the cactus. I'll post those tomorrow when we get back to Corpus.

We have a long day ahead of us, so I'm headed to bed. More tomorrow, hopefully.