January 26, 2005 - Drive to Alamogordo, New Mexico

Although the wind had completely died down and we slept well, we both awakened just before sunrise. Monika went out to take some pictures of a really bright full moon-we were at 5,000 feet altitude and the clear desert air made it shine like a lantern.

I joined the fun a bit later and tried taking panoramic shots of the sunrise, but the clouds got in the way at a crucial moment so the pictures didn't come out very well.

After our morning photography session we had a leisurely breakfast and took our time hitching up the trailer since the campground's quiet hours extended to 8 a.m. and we couldn't start our truck before then anyway. Thus it was that I had the time to check the trailer's tire pressures, and while I was doing so I noticed that yet another tire was showing signs of shedding its tread. It was the old spare tire that I had first replaced in Montana during Wanderung 6, so it only had about 10,000 miles on it, which was disappointing. But I was now carrying two mounted spares, so Monika popped one off the back of the trailer while I set about jacking it up. I used my new jack and wooden platform that spread the weight and kept it from sliding around, and that worked perfectly, much to my satisfaction. Jacking it up on a nice asphalt parking lot felt ever so much more stable than the first time I did it on a soft shoulder, and for that I was thankful. Still, I had some trouble with a stiff lug nut that kept trying to cross-thread itself, and the whole process consumed almost exactly an hour.

That all delayed our departure from 8 to 9 o'clock, but fortunately we had planned only to drive as far as Alamogordo, which we thought would take us 3-4 hours. The sky became overcast in a very peculiar way as we drove west through the desert toward El Paso; it was overcast but I could not see the base of the cloud cover and could not form any distinct impression of how high the clouds were. That may seem a trivial issue to most people, but for a pilot the height of a ceiling (and room to fly below it!) are of critical importance, so it bothered me in an ill-defined sort of way, making me vaguely uneasy.

Finally just outside of El Paso it started to rain! I just mentally was not prepared to encounter rain in the desert, so it took me a few seconds but when I put 2 and 2 together I realized that I had been unable to see the base of the cloud cover because of virga, rain that falls from clouds but evaporates before it ever reaches the surface. The rain stayed with us off and on for the rest of the day and night; it shrouded the mountains along our route with a watery veil, and I'm sure made them appear darker than they would have in the more typical bright sunlight of the desert regions.

We stopped off to eat at a Whattaburger as we bypassed El Paso to the north. During lunch we returned the phone calls we had missed while out of Sprint range. The Whattaburger sandwiches were truly enormous, on the order of Burger King's Whoppers, and had lots of lettuce, tomato, and mustard, which we liked. The French Fries reminded me very much of McDonald's in size, texture, and taste, so we enjoyed our lunch as we gabbed with folks back home or left messages on their answering machines!

Turning north, we followed US 54 north to Alamogordo and put in for the night at a Good Sam campground-those campgrounds had, in our experience, boasted nice sites, clean restrooms, and friendly folks, and that's about all we need, really. I felt too tired to really do justice to the Museum of Space History down the road, so we just worked on a backlog of picture processing during the remainder of the afternoon. Monika selected pictures on Daddy while I stitched together panoramic shots on Baby. After a quick dinner of eggs and bacon (none dare call it breakfast!) Monika continued to make backup disks of all our pictures on Daddy while I lay down to ease a nagging headache. That turned out to be a bad move strategically as I was tired, the sound of rain on the roof was soothing, and so I completely conked out for the night. Monika finished her backups, turned out the lights, and turned in a little bit later.