The Monument is closed today. It’s the second day in a row and may go on for a few more days. However, the visitor center is open but the dune drive is closed. Why else would anyone come here but to drive the dune drive and slide down the dunes?

 The last couple of weeks we have been having missile tests going on which necessitates closing of the dune drive for a couple of hours as a precaution. Yesterday another missile test was scheduled, but at 9:08 a.m. a drone much like you see above took off from the air base next to the Monument and crashed in the Monument. It was only 2.5 miles from the visitor center. Pieces are being picked up as I write. We are told that the drone was to be the target for the missile test. I guess it worked; perhaps too well. Kedric thinks our crash and closure is actually a UFO crash that’s being covered up and we should all be wearing tin foil hats. He could be on to something…

Shannon and I went to El Paso early yesterday morning and missed the action. When we came back at about 4:00 we noticed a lot of military personnel, and the dune drive was closed. So, we missed all the action. Today, however, there is lots of activity that we can see from our motor home. Most of the activity consists of groups of people in neon safety vests standing and talking with each other or deciding where to go for pizza. Late morning there was the sound of an explosion that came from the area in the dunes where the drone went down and a plume of smoke rising in the air. Maybe progress was being made…?

Back to El Paso. I had wanted to visit it because of the romance of El Paso as I grew up watching westerns. On the way to El Paso strains of Marty Robbins song kept wafting through my head. The other reason is that there is an NPS site in El Paso. It is called Chamizal National Memorial and commemorates the peaceful settlement of a 100+ year border dispute with Mexico that was settled in the late 1960’s by LBJ. Then we went to lunch. Mexican food, of course.

The weekend before we went to one of the crown jewels of the National Wildlife Refuge system, Bosque del Apache (Woods of the Apaches).

 The refuge is on the Rio Grande River about halfway between White Sands and Albuquerque. It has water and trees and fields and feels so much more like SE United States than the arid areas of the Southwest. And, they had sandhill cranes! The white board at the visitor center said the latest count of cranes was over 9,400.

 As in other NWR’s, Bosque del Apache had a wildlife drive through the refuge that took visitors close to the water fowl. We saw lots of pin tail ducks and coots as well as Canadian and snow geese. We stopped and watched hundreds of snow geese feeding in a field in the refuge and then drove on. A few minutes later the snow geese were in the air, and we were in a position to see their fly-in to one of the areas with standing water. It was great! Then we went into San Antonio and had supper. Green chili hamburgers at the one bar in town. Life doesn’t get much better.