Springerville, Arizona, Elev. 7,000 ft.
And now for something completely different: Having complained about the heat in southern Mexico, I'm now ready to complain about the cold in Arizona. We are camped in an RV park, but we haven't hooked up to the water supply, because it's expected to freeze tonight, and the hose would likely split. We're running the little electric heater, and the central (propane) heating is set at 60F, in case the electric heater can't keep up.

So we left Alamogordo this morning, stopping first at a Kwik-Lube for an overdue oil change. That didn't take long, and we then headed for White Sands.

I posted a link to White Sands last night, didn't I? Well, that's not actually where we were going. We did stop there, but the wind was still blowing fiercely, carrying great quantities of sand with it. A visit to that park involves driving around in the middle of the sand dunes, which sounded pretty suicidal, under the circumstances - so we went on to the White Sands that Robin wanted to visit, which was this one. Oh, I said. A missile range and museum. Well, you have a good time, and I'll read my new book. So we drove to the museum parking lot, and Robin went to check things out. He came back a minute later to say that the museum isn't open on Saturdays, but they were going to let him look at the missiles sitting around outside (the ones on the website, I think). He went to look at missiles while I cooked breakfast.

Once we had eaten, we set out in earnest. We didn't get much over 50 mph most of the day, because of the wind. Oh, by the way, when we turned on the news last night, we heard that six people had been killed in a wind-related accident in the same area of New Mexico, at about 4:00 p.m., which is when we had just cleared the really windy area and were in the mountains.

So... At 50 mph, we made our way across the rest of New Mexico and into Arizona, climbed to 8,500 feet at Alpine, then slid down to 7,000. After this, the RV park situation gets pretty patchy for a while, so we thought it best to stop. It was supper time anyway.

Our itinerary keeps changing with the wind, the snow, whatever else is getting in our way. At this point it's looking as if we'll head straight over Hwy 40 to California before we turn north.

Meanwhile, my niece has kindly forwarded some pictures of our gliding adventure. I'll only show you a picture of me in the glider (proof!) and one of the glider landing - with me in it, I think
- as I forgot to ask permission to show anybody else. Tsk. That's Bill the pilot in the seat behind me.