Two More Nights in New Mexico

We had planned on going through Roswell (the extraterrestrial alien capitol of the USA) but decided to stick with the Interstates and go through Albuquerque.  We found a Coast to Coast membership park 19 miles east of Albuquerque called Hidden Valley.  Sounded good in the book but turned out to not be so hot.  

For one thing, it was Saturday and a large group of locals had taken over the pool and rec hall for some sort of picnic with a Karaoke singer (not very good) and a few dozen kids.  So no pool or rec center for us.  And, the spaces were the skinniest we've ever seen.  Oh well, what you get for $10.

When we had headed north from Las Cruces, the Mesilla Valley was on our left for about 60 miles.  The agriculture was continuous and incredibly green.  Plus, you can see how much Monsoon rains they've had by the color of highway median strip.

But, what was double-cool was that the Rio Grande was on our right side the whole way and it was green agriculture also.

Here's a kinda weird rest stop with little open-air buildings for picnics at the rest area.  There are some neat ones across New Mexico which are pretty adobe roof-covered picnic spots but this looks like a little prison farm.  ?????

Our site for tonight is at Tucumcari, pretty close to the Texas panhandle which will allow us to go all the way through Texas in one day, instead of the south route which takes 4-5 days.  Great site here in at the Cactus RV park which used to have a motel also but like most of the town, has sadly died.  More than half the businesses we saw were closed.  Very hard to see.

Here are some of the old motel rooms.  Looks like it was pretty cool.

One interesting story.  Only one grocery store/supermarket in town.  It's called Lowe's and they have a house brand called SureFine.  It's distributed by Western Family Foods, Inc., Portland, Oregon which I believe is Thriftway.  Another "it's a small world" thing.