Sunday, March 15 9:03 pm

I write to you tonight from Whites City, New Mexico. Since my last post where I told about this trip, we have had a major change of plans. We were originally going to head north up to all the places listed in the last post, however a major weather system moved in that was going to derail our plans because the temperatures in Southern Utah were going to be unusually cold. I have no desire to freeze us to death so back to the drawing board I went. I spent Friday while the kids were in school researching where we could go that would not be so cold. The only drivable answer that was not below the Mexican border was, naturally, Texas. So we headed out Friday night and made it to an area near Chirracahua National Monument. We spent Saturday morning exploring the monument, which was really remote and very neat. There are very cool rock formations too look at and we got to see a deer. However when we got to the top of the peak, it began to SNOW on us…so much for my warm spring break! That afternoon after exploring the monument we were off toward Texas. We ate dinner in El Paso (don’t even ask, I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say we made a huge error in choice of food; we had the idiocy to choose something other than Mexican when were so close to Mexico we could spit there…) The kids were fascinated by being so close to the border and they got a good lesson in current events when we explained the Tale of Two Cities thing going on between El Paso and Juarez.

After dinner we headed out of El Paso on a small two lane Texas Road where were stopped not once, but twice by law enforcement wondering if we were transporting illegals in the camper. Do I LOOK like a coyote to you with my 5 kids and my family truckster??? It was a long interesting night and even though we were not transporting illegals we did in fact camp illegally two nights out of two. (This is another issue about which I should probably skip the details and simply say we were too tired to drive anymore and it was better to just stop and sleep; it just so happens that we happen to drive with a small house on the back of the car…)

We have had the usual obnoxious car antics that would drive lesser parents to drop their kids off on the Salt Flats and let the javalinas sort them out, thankfully it seems that, although we don’t think of ourselves as patient people we’ve never once actually thrown a kid to the wild animals. This trip is no different and everyone is still occupying their seat in the car. W

So we are headed to the Padre Island National Seashore on the Gulf of Mexico. Today we spent the day with another bad food experience, and then wandering the Carlsbad Caverns. They caverns are totally amazing, but I will tell you what…this place is seriously remote. We are really far from civilization. Very few businesses in the town of Carlsbad were open today; it’s Sunday. It is off season to be fair, but you know us city people we want our goods and services. Walmart was open for just our kind.