Living on Saturday

I was recently directed to a blog of a young woman who had found out during her second pregnancy that their baby had a severe abnormality that would ultimately lead to their son's death just minutes after birth. This isn't an area of life with which I have any experience, but I found the young woman's blog to be very insightful and challenging. I ended up going to the first entry of her blog and reading all the way through to the end.

One particular entry
http://anticipatingarthur.blogspot.com/2015/10/we-will-be-sad-forever.html
on the first anniversary of their son's birth and death talks about the story in their daughter's story-book Bible of the day between Jesus' death and resurrection, the discouragement of that day for His followers. She writes:

I’m glad this little story Bible devoted a chapter to the angst and sorrow of Jesus’ followers.  Because wedged between that Friday and Sunday was one sad, dark, lonely day.  And in a way, that Saturday is where all of human history takes place.  Between the garden and eternity is one long, confusing, sorrowful hunk of time.  God has made promises, but we can’t see when or how He will keep them.  He has told us about the joy that is coming, but it seems so far away that we really believe we will be sad forever.  We live our whole lives in that in-between where Jesus’ followers spent a day.

As we are so near the remembrance of Jesus' death and resurrection, I thought some of my friends might enjoy reading this too. Some days it is hard to believe that Sunday is coming, but it is! And it will be so much more glorious because of living through Saturday to get there!

I recommend reading her blog - the first entry is here:
http://anticipatingarthur.blogspot.com/2014/05/introducing-cadence.html
It took me a couple of hours to read them all, but, as I said above, I found her writing to be insightful and challenging.

Wind

Our WeatherBug apps have been warning us of high winds for this area for Tuesday and Wednesday, and the weather predictors have gotten it right. It was very windy in Carlsbad Caverns area on Tuesday, and quite windy for our drive up to Roswell. We are thankful that although Miss Doozie is a "high profile vehicle", she is also heavy and her weight is concentrated lower in her mass! Even so, we were glad that the drive was just under 2 hours and not any longer.

We are settled in at Midway RV Park. We stayed here last year when we were in Roswell also.

We are in the end spot with trees right beside us.

It is a nice spot with a nice big "yard" next to us, but a rather busy road just beyond that. But, that's ok! I was hoping that the bending of the trees in the wind might be noticeable in the picture, but it isn't... suffice it to say that we've been laughing at birds who are trying to fly against the wind and come to a landing in that yard area next to us after going backwards instead of forwards. And, we're glad to be settled in for a few days!

Visit to Carlsbad Caverns National Park

We went to Carlsbad Caverns National Park on Tuesday. We got to see the exhibits and an informational movie, but the thought of climbing down 750 feet (75 story building) and then walking around and having to climb back up 750 feet was more than we thought we could do. We'll come back to see the caverns when the elevators are working again!

Patti talked with a park ranger - it seems that the main elevator had its motor get burned out (not specified why). It was built in the 1970s and parts seem to be hard to come by. There are two older elevators (about 100 years old) that may be able to be repaired more quickly - they have not been in use and the structure that keeps them in a straight line up/down has several cross bars (40 out of 200) which have deteriorated to the point of being non-functioning. A company has been engaged to correct that, and I think they currently hope to have those elevators back in service by the end of May. The elevators have not been in service since November 4.

In researching this, Patti found that the motor was overhauled in 2007.
http://www.nps.gov/cave/learn/news/20071029_elevator_motor_overhaul.htm

TripAdvisor seems to indicate that the primary elevators were out of service in 2011, but the secondary elevators were used.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g143018-i4829-k4418908-Elevator-Carlsbad_Caverns_National_Park_New_Mexico.html

This is information about the current outage.
http://www.currentargus.com/story/news/local/carlsbad-caverns/2016/02/24/caverns-elevator-repair-pushed-back-may/80863520/
It is interesting because the lady at Carlsbad seems to say "the problem isn't funding" but the Secretary of the Interior seems to imply that the deferred funding of projects in the national park service may be a contributing factor.

She wasn't trying to find all this history on the elevators, but rather "what happened when it failed? how did the people get off?" One of the articles mentioned that only one of the two primary elevators has a motor problem, but that they cannot use it because there would be no failure plan (no way to evacuate passengers if the second elevator failed). So, our guess is that somehow passengers would transfer from one elevator to the other in case of a failure.

Regardless of the elevator issue, we still enjoyed the park:

On the road in to the visitor's center, we stopped at an exhibit of an Indian Rock Shelter (cave) that had an "intermittent water hole" nearby. Mescalero Apache were in this area.

 

The exhibit area in the visitor's center had lots of photos of the caverns. The writeup for this one said:
"Carlsbad Cave National Monument located 30 miles S.W. of Carlsbad, N.M. is the largest and most spectacular cave in the world. Good Trails and Electric Lights, etc. Good roads leading to it."
This succinct paragraph appeared on the first promotional photo cards produced by Ray V. Davis n the early 1920s as he worked to coax visitors out to the cave he loved.
Dated 1923, this may be the earliest photograph of the Natural Entrance in existence. Note the figure of a man wearing a light-colored hat in the right foreground. It is likely that this person is Jim White, who shared Davis' passion for the cave, and worked with him to promote the caverns.

These were for sale in the gift shop (we didn't buy one!). Does Jimmy remember that either Granny gave us one of these, or had one in her house on Irisdale Ave?

The view from the parking lot was magnificent.

Patti was enjoying the view.

Looking back toward the visitor center. The flag is blowing straight out. They had warned of high winds arriving on Tuesday, and the weather people were right!

Since we decided that we didn't want to hike down into the cavern, we had noticed a 9.5 mile driving trail and had picked up an informational sheet about the things to see on it.

We took Walnut Canyon Desert Drive.

 There were many beautiful flowers along the drive.

This bush is about 2 feet tall.

The flowers are about the size of a fist, reminded us a little of Lantana, but we aren't sure.

This was at Rattlesnake Canyon Trail overlook. Near the bottom of the picture on the left is Lechuguilla (lay-choo-GHEE-ya) with a reddish colored Prickly Pear Cactus growing around it (flat paddle-shaped pads). The taller plant above those two is Sotol (SO-toll).

Dwayne was busy taking pictures - Rattlesnake Canyon Trail overlook is just behind him.

Close up of a very small plant. The flowering plant was about 6" across, the blooms like tiny violets.

Blooming Ocotillo (O-ko-tee-yo). The information sheet said: The Ocotillo is well adapted to the fickleness of desert conditions. Much of the time it appears to be plain, thorny sticks reaching up to the sky. Following rain, it quickly sprouts leaves. Its bright red flowers, in blossom from April to June, are one of the most eye-catching in the desert landscape. Dry spells will cause the plant to lose its leaves again, only to re-grow when enough moisture is available. This cycle may be repeated several times in a single year.

We saw this bloom a little ways away from the road - it was a low-growing plant, not sure what it was.

Another picture of the bloom we saw from the road.

This flowering bush was about 3' tall and wide. It almost looked like Texas Sage, but the flowers were different.

This is a Yucca (YUK-a), we think a Soaptree Yucca which is the state flower of New Mexico.

One of the limestone cliffs along the road.

Updated: From El Paso to Carlsbad Caverns

Correction: the peak I thought was Guadelupe Peak is really El Capitan. I've updated the information in the post!

Monday morning we left from the WalMart parking lot, fueled up at Murphy USA - almost full... the Sams card cuts off after two uses (each to $100).

Not sure what we were expecting, but certainly we have gotten more than we anticipated on this trip! What beauty and grandeur!

Our "old fashioned" paper map. We started from over near the "El Paso Int'l" on the east side of El Paso, and have stopped just off the map to the north in Whites City, NM

You see that "Guadelope Mtns. N.P." on the border there? Guadelupe Peak is the highest point in Texas, and... even though EVERYTHING is bigger in Texas, it is only 8749 feet. As Patti told her dad many years ago, it isn't that the peak is not so big, but rather that everything else in Texas is so big that it may *seem* not so big. (She may have come to Texas as an adult, but she seems to have Texas in her blood...)

About halfway across Hudspeth County on US Route 61/180, you see a picnic table on the map. We stopped at this picnic area to get some pictures of the beauty around us.

A panorama shot with Miss Doozie and The Jee-rage on the side. It may look like a lot of nothing... but it really is lovely!

 

The Jee-rage and Miss Doozie

Patti out to take some pictures with her phone, stopped to smile at her honey taking a picture of her!

As we got further down the road, we could see El Capitan, which is near Guadelupe Peak.

If you look at the map, this is from the picnic area near Salt Flat.

There were alkali flats along the way - flat white salt-looking areas (no pictures).

But then, there was an irrigated area growing green with some grassy crop, probably wheat.

El Capitan was coming up ahead of us - this picture is through the windshield, that's what caused the darkness at the top and the things that might look like big birds in the sky are bug splatters on the windshield ;-)

The weather reports are indicating strong winds for Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday. Signs along the road warned of strong winds. The windsock was showing that there were moderately strong winds as we drove through.

It is nice to have an altimeter as we're climbing to see how high we're driving. We were at about 5250 ft at this point, eventually getting up to 5600+ at the highest pass.

This is El Capitan from the north side - if you're following along with the map, this was the picnic area that is shown as if it is in the green area of the park, right along a very curvy section of road.

God's beauty

Miss Doozie forehead-to-forehead with El Capitan and Dwayne coming back from taking the beautiful pictures that are inluded this entry above.

We're stopped for a couple of nights near Carlsbad Caverns. We were thinking we would visit the caverns while here, but looking on the website have found that the elevators into the caverns are out of service, necessitating a more strenuous tour if we decide to do it: "While the elevators are down, you may walk in/out the Natural Entrance, a steep 750 ft. descent/ascent." Oh well, there's probably other interesting things to do!

Interesting places along the way...

We are heading east, to arrive in the DFW area by mid-April. We left Marana (north of Tucson) late morning on Sunday (after "attending" church with our home church in Irving).

On the way across Arizona, we kept seeing billboards for "The Thing". Since there was a Dairy Queen there as well as "The Thing", we decided to stop for lunch on Sunday.

"The Thing" - Dwayne did some research online and we decided to pass on actually *seeing* "The Thing"...

We were roughly heading toward Roswell, NM for Easter, with the plan to stop at the Escapee park near Lakewood, NM for a few days first. Googlemaps had suggested a route northeast out of Las Cruces to Alamogorda and then across through Cloudcraft; but just that day, we had seen a post from RVers on Facebook that suggested that taking a large motorcoach on the road through Cloudcraft was probably not wise. We opted for the route through El Paso instead.

Just outside of Las Cruces, we visited a rest area that had an interesting sculpture.

Panorama shot to the east and south - beautiful

Evidently this roadrunner is made up of trash...

I probably should have gotten closer - I didn't read the write-up on it until preparing this blog post! It would have been interesting to get a close-up of the makeup of the sculpture.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/14700

Miss Doozie and The Jee-rage ready to keep on motivating down the road...

We stayed in the WalMart parking lot east of El Paso Sunday night, fueled up at the Murphy USA and started heading east and north on Monday morning.

One of the best parts of the nomadic life - visiting family who have moved far away!

On our way back east, we were able to stop and see Ginny and Josh in Tucson (Patti's niece and nephew-in-law). They had been the receivers and keepers of a package that we ordered in January but which arrived after we headed west, so we were able to get that picked up (a replacement pump for our kitty watering dish).

We didn't stop for long, but did get to visit with them a little and go to Oregano's and Frost.

Josh and Ginny at Oregano's Pizza Bistro

Josh, Ginny, Patti, and Dwayne at Oregano's

No pictures at Frost, but suffice it to say that the gelato disappeared quickly (except for Ginny's!). ;-)

Antique Farm Machinery

We had been meaning to get pictures of the "Antique Farm Machinery Display" in Yuma to post...we got a couple of pictures from the road in front before we left Yuma:

This "Observation Garden" and "Antique Farm Machinery Display" is at the Yuma County Fairgrounds, right across from the Yuma airport / MCAS base.

A MCAS aircraft took off while we were there.

We didn't stop to walk around (the day was pretty warm) but took pictures so Patti's brother could see!

We weren't exactly sure what we were looking at...

Maybe something we can see on a later visit to Yuma.