May Day in New Mexico

May 1, 2013

A new month and a new time zone for us today. After breakfast at the drug store in Fort Davis, we drove northwest to Interstate 10—passing more staggeringly beautiful scenery but I won’t bore you with that again—and then headed west, exiting Texas through El Paso and entering New Mexico. The scenery along the interstate isn’t nearly as dramatic as what we’ve been in; it’s arid, dusty and flat, with jagged volcanic peaks visible along the horizon through the dusty haze. We see a number of “dust devils,” small twisters picking up dust into the air. We passed into the Mountain Time Zone just east of El Paso, and gained an hour. (So a tiny little corner of west Texas is in a different time zone from the rest of the state. That must be a little awkward…) We were taken aback by the speed limit on I-10—80 mph. 

It's flat and straight on the way to El Paso, 80 mph speed limit is a bit much for us.

It’s faster than we like to drive the RoadTrek, even on a straight, flat, big road like this one. When it was my turn to drive, I just put the cruise on 70 and let everybody pass me.

We didn’t have a specific destination for our drive today. Jack called a Coast Guard buddy who lives part of the year in the Tucson area, to see if he’s around, thinking we might stop for a brief visit tomorrow. However, we weren’t able to get hold of him, so we figure he and his wife have gone back to Alaska, where they live during the hot part of the year. I get on the internet at a pit stop just over the New Mexico line (we’ve been unable to access our Verizon MyFi internet through much of TX, unfortunately, due to no or weak Verizon signal) and find an interesting state park about 30 miles south of Deming, NM that’s supposed to have a nice (and cheap) campground and a good museum. It’s Pancho Villa State Park, preserving the history of this area in the early part of the 20th century, when Pancho Villa was terrorizing it. We decide to drive down there and spend a couple of nights, since we need a little down time for me to work on my book project and do the Grapevine newsletter, and Jack wants to work on his book that he’s writing; plus we both feel a need to improve our knowledge of our country’s history with Mexico.

That turns out to be a great call. We pull into the campground around 7 pm. It’s almost empty except for the park campground host and maybe three other RV campers. Each campsite has water and electricity hookups and a stone picnic shelter with nice concrete picnic tables; the grounds are nicely landscaped with desert plants, mostly prickly pear cactus and yucca, but mesquite trees also dot the campground. There’s a well-maintained bathhouse with showers. And all this for only $14/night! Plus it’s very cool so good for sleeping, lots of birds around, and we discover that we can actually get a Verizon 4G signal so have a good internet connection!!! This may be our favorite campground yet!! (I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet how these park campgrounds handle their check-ins nowadays. Most often a large signboard near the entrance to the park campground gives instructions and costs for campers to sign in and pay their fee. There’s a metal box containing forms and envelopes, and a sturdy metal pole topped by a metal box with a slit, called an “iron ranger.” You fill out the form, pull off the sticky part to put on either your vehicle or on a little signpost by your campsite, and put your check , cash, or credit card number in the iron ranger. No muss, no fuss.

We stroll around, take in the scenery, and read the history signs. Turns out Pancho Villa came right through our campground and attacked the army post and residents of Columbus.

We climb Cootes Hill, a lookout post, and walk through the surrounding gardens.

Cootes Hill as it looks now.

 

Cootes Hill as it looked in 1916.

On the way down we spot a few birds, including one that we think is the curved-bill thrasher—an interesting-looking bird that’s not on our lifelist. However, we need a better sighting to confirm. As the sun goes down, we sit at our picnic table and toast the sunset. Nice spot!

The view as we drink our mango daiquiris.

As promised in the last blog, here’s our Bird List so far, with asterisks by those new to our lifelist. If we were more expert birdwatchers, there would be many more, as we’ve caught glimpses of many additional birds but weren’t able to ID them.

Vermilion flycatcher, turkey vulture, Bell’s vireo, *golden-fronted woodpecker, Say’s phoebe, northern cardinal, greater roadrunner, house finch, common raven, *northern rough-winged swallow, *summer tanager, *prothonotary warbler, *yellow-breasted chat, *yellow-rumped warbler, northern mockingbird, mourning dove, cliff swallow, Mexican jay, black-headed grosbeak, black-chinned  hummingbird, Wilson’s warbler, *Scott’s oriole, chipping sparrow, house sparrow, lesser goldfinch, black-crested titmouse, acorn woodpecker, scrub jay, *western kingbird, white-winged dove, *canyon towhee, *Grace’s warbler, *zone-tailed hawk, possible *curvebilled thrasher

State count: 9 [Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico]

Odometer count:

Surber, VA: 107,435

Columbus, NM: 111,332

Accommodations avg cost: 27 nights @ $15.63/night

Where we are:

Camped at Pancho Villa State Park, New Mexico

Pancho Villa's attack route. We are camped just below Cootes Hill. Part of Pancho's army attacked the army at Camp Furlong while another part attacked the town. President Wilson dispatched an army of 10,000 under General Pershing who invaded Mexico with the intent of punishing Pancho Villa. Pershing's army never did catch Pancho.