Today we took another “detour” and drove 3 hours south to White Sands National Park. We hadn’t originally planned to visit, but it was in the general direction of Mesa, Arizona which is our next stop, so we went for it!
The terrain is definitely changing the further south and west we drive. It’s looking more & more like the desert. We even saw our first tumbleweeds!
After driving for miles & miles and seeing nothing but arid, sun-baked dirt dotted with small dry, scraggly shrubs all of a sudden you come upon this “oasis” of dazzling white sand dunes... It’s so crazy! (Technically, White Sands National Park is an oasis because it preserves a shallow water supply. They don’t really know where all the white sand came from though. The theory they came up with is that a “sea retreated millions of years ago leaving behind deep layers of gypsum.” Could it just be that God created it that way?! His creativity never ceases to amaze me!)
We tried sledding down the dunes in a plastic saucer, but it wouldn’t budge. So Jimbo pulled out one of our snowboards and that worked better once we found a dune that was steep enough. These dunes were much prettier than the sand dunes in Silver Lake, Michigan. But, the Silver Lake dunes were more fun because you can actually sandboard and sled down those!
After playing in the sand for a while, we dusted off the fine white powder (as much as we could), jumped back in the truck and decided to head further south to El Paso, TX because Jimbo found a retro arcade he wanted to check out. (I guess our new motto is “have arcade, will travel!”) Unfortunately this one wasn’t as great as the one in OK, but it’s all part of the adventure!
We boondocked at Camping World. They had water, but no electric. God knew exactly what we needed because we definitely needed a lot of water to get all the sand out of our hair (and every other nook & cranny, lol!).