White Sands holidays

So we were back in New Mexico, right on Texas-New Mexico border. From El Paso we went to a little town called Mesilla, there is just a church and a tiny square with few souvenir shops, one restaurant and two coffee shops, one of them on top of coffee and pies selling Polish ceramics from Bolesławiec. If it's on your way stop by, it's a very friendly little town. We heard Santa Fe is similar (just bigger). We don't know what Boleslawiec looks like, we've never been there, but if you want to buy ceramics it's probably better to buy it there than in Mesilla.

Our next stop was White Sands. It's a picturesque desert with - as it's easy to guess - white "sand". The entrance is 3 USD per person but with Interagency Pass America the Beautiful we enter for free. There are a few trails that you can walk, read about local fauna and flora and slide down the dunes. Some people were sliding on sand sleds, but it didn't look as if it was working well.

There is also a place for watching the sunset (with information about what time is the sunset on that day), you can also get a permit to camp overnight but only with a tent, so we spent a night with Eddie in Alamogordo. As usually, we planned to spend there an hour or two and we ended up spending four, just because Maciek got so exhausted he just fell asleep.

White Sands is a quite unique dune desert. It's not really a sandy desert as it's not composed of quartz but of gypsium and calcium suflate. We read somewhere that driving through this desert (of course there is an asphalt road) it feels like going through the snow. It's not only because of the color. Dunes don't absorb the heat as they reflect the sun's rays so the sand is cold. We run barefoot most of the time but by the end of the day it got pretty chilly so we put the shoes back on.

After few nights of dry camping we stayed for a change at a real campground. In Alamogordo with Passport America discount we paid 15 USD but sometime we just want to charge all the electronics and take a long hot shower without thinking how soon our grey water tanks will get full. Besides it was time for oil change and it's easier to do without the trailer. It feels strange to drive without Eddie after those few days... Car accelerates lightly and swiftly, you can see everything in the mirrors, turn anywhere you want, go through dips and steep hills without scratching the asphalt...

Campground in Alamogordo

We stayed just outside Alamogordo. The town is nothing special, situated between the mountains and the desert looks a little bit like the place from which Walter White from one of our favourite series "Breaking Bad" goes to the desert in his RV rebuilt into laboratory to make methamphetamine. Walter White lives in Albaquerqui, some few hundred miles north from here, but it seems similar.

Alamogordo landscape

In Alamogordo we saw a local car shop with oil change and another space museum - NASA Space History Museum. It's located on the side of the hill overlooking entire Alamogordo, in a four story high, glass building. Unfortunately comparing to the previous NASA centers this one is a dissapointment. We didn't go to IMAX cause the movie they played was the same one we've seen in Florida. Planetarium was not very interesting and the exhibition in the museum was not so bad but after what we've seen in Kennedy Space Center and in Houston we got our expectations high. Besides parts of it are outdated (for example according to what we've seen there, space shuttles are still operating).

Big part of exhibition is dedicated to private space initiatives in New Mexico. State authorities realize how huge is the potential of private space flights and would love to be the center of it. One floor is dedicated to the Ansari X PRIZE given in 2004, it was 10 milion USD for the first private flight to the orbit, there's a movie about two flights (from New Mexico of course), there are mock-ups and drafts of projects that were competeing for the prize. 

Actually you can take a trip to the place where Virgin Galactic Spaceport will be built. But as (if we're correct) there's nothing there yet, we skipped it (later we found out that we were wrong, the construction is quite advanced). Additionally every New Mexican who was in space is a celebrity there. Well, NASA made some fund cutting almost two years ago so you have to try really hard to get some of the space pie.

NASA Space History Museum

Like in every museum the details were the most interesting part. For example this was the first place where it was openly admitted how much Americans used nazi rocket program for their own research. Yes, we know, even kids know that, but we thought it was kind of a shame, something good to write in Wikipedia, but not for the museum. But there it was. Alamgordo museum focuses mostly on the engines and rockets. From the top floor you can see a wonderful view - there's not only White Sands but also White Sands Missle Range. And there gentelmen who some years earlier had used to run in German labs in late 1940s hired by federal government were building American wunderwaffe.

Nova/Starchaser IV - the biggest rocket launched from Great Britain territory

For over 10 years now saved and preserved V-2 rocket has been standing proudly on a square in front of museum and on a wall inside of cosmic Hall of Fame one can some people who came to States together in 1946. There is irony in what we are writing here but praising wunderwaffe people without putting them in wider perspective is a little bit like Pacific War Museum in Fredricksburg. We wonder whether there is a Europe War Museum in Japan Town somewhere. It's a winner's right to use work of the ones that lost, but having a place for Nazis in Hall of Fame that's a little bit sleeky...

Original parts of V-2

From the museum windows you can also see far away (50 km/30 miles so some imagination is required) Northrup Strip, which is a military airbase called also by NASA "White Sands Space Harbor". That's a place used since the 1970s for the trainings before space flights and one of backup space shuttle landing sites. It was really used only once, in 1982, but well, better this than nothing. Probably there's a better place to see it at the dunes, at the very edge of the part of White Sands open to visitors, as it's just some 10 miles from there (unless the army made sure that no dune is overlooking their premises…).

The biggest attraction for Maciek - Whisper dish - it really works!

Second detail that we found interesting was the post-movie story of a man, who was in charge of planetarium. After boring show about the planets he told us, that (if we remember well) over 30 states consider Pluto a planet. New Mexico voted an appropriate law in 2007. It's fascinating, that some delegates from small towns (there aren't too many big ones in New Mexico) were sitting and discussing whether Pluto is a planet, dwarf-planet or maybe planetoid. 

 White Sands in a distance

We left museum - unlike us - at 3 pm, and we went for lunch to Can’t Stop Smoking BBQ - we do not recommend it to vegetarians but we do recommend it to meat eaters. Piles of delicious meat at affordable price. Leaving Alamogordo we stopped to taste local wines and pistachios - we ended up buying a bag of onion-garlic flavoured pistachios and a bottle of delicious pistachio rose wine. Nice way to end a day.