Next stop is Roswell, NM! We stayed at the Red Barn RV Park Feb 1-5. It’s a nice campground, small but with plenty of space on the campsites. The kids missed having more room to roam, but we did plenty of roaming away from camp.

We stopped in Roswell because that was one of the places on the way to the Pacific that Jackson wanted to see. While there, we went to two amazing parks (Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Bottomless Lakes State Park) and, of course, an alien museum.

New Mexico is beautiful. However, driving from Amarillo to Roswell was like a repeating reel of beige background topped with blue. It was mind numbing at times. It still distracted the kids during math, but not nearly as much as any of the previous drives. It was the fastest math in transit yet!

The most curious thing is the amount of litter. I assume it is because it is so flat, there is nowhere for the litter to collect and hide. The fields were dotted with flapping plastic bags and other detritus stuck in fences, on cacti and naked bushes. We used the visual to determine which way the wind was a blowing, and it was blowing. When coming from behind, it is a nice boost to the drive; any other direction is annoying to the drive.

I must break into the Roswell post with a tale I forgot to tell from when we were in Oklahoma. We drove from Tulsa to Clinton, OK for an overnight before heading on to Amarillo. We stayed at an awful place called Atchley Route 66 RV Park. Do not stay there. We would’ve been better off staying at the Love’s just down the road. Gah. It was an expanse of flat dirt, sites were not clearly marked other than the upside-down trash cans covering the water connections⎯not even other campers. While looping around this expanse of flat dirt, we ran over a rusty piece of metal and popped a tire!! Luckily, we were already done with driving for the day, the popped tire happened close enough to where we parked we were able to do so painlessly, and there was a tire shop down the road .

Chris was fabulous, as usual. He got the tire off with no help…well, I helped by saying, “Let’s call AAA and get them to come change the tire.” No lie, I’m that girl; I changed my flat tires in my 20s, I don’t want to now. But Chris did it! We all cheered!! He was hampered by a not-fully-functioning bottleneck jack, and still he won the day. The next morning we had the tire shop put a new tire on the rim and brought it back to put on the camper. Easier said than done. But we got it done! Since the bottleneck jack was not functioning properly, we also enlisted the truck’s jack to lift the suspension just enough to get the new (deflated) tire on the wheel hub and affix the lug-nuts, tight enough to bring the rig to the tire shop and have the gentleman there tighten up for driving safely.

We all cheered wildly when done!! My biggest contribution was figuring out how to get the truck’s jack out of the truck and being a cheerleader. Chris not only got the tire off and on, but he also was able to troubleshoot his way around the stupid bottleneck jack issue. Oh, how I love that man of mine…brains and tenacity is quite the combination. Good riddance to Atchley, we gave them a horrible review and took no pics! (I should have taken pics of the tire changing, but emotions were running high and pictures escaped my mind.)

Now that I have written more about OK in this NM post, I will leave you with some amazing pictures that will more than make up for the lack of words attached to our visit in Roswell.

Hello, Red Barn RV Park in Roswell, NM. We were welcomed by the most glorious sunset.