Stranded!

My last post was as I was leaving Florida after visiting Everglades, Dry Tortugas, and Biscayne.  A lot has happened since then.

After staying in northern Florida for the night, we drove over to Meridian, Mississippi to visit Duane and Elaine (my uncle and aunt).  It was nice to see them and stay in their nice cabin down by their pond.

After a good night's rest, we drove over to Hot Springs, Arkansas for the next national park.  We walked down the main street past several old bathhouses that use water from the hot springs.  The bathhouses were all booked up, but it was still cool to see the buildings.  One of them is owned by the Park Service now and is a nice museum that we walked through.  At the end of the bathhouse row, there is a fountain with the hot water coming right out of the ground.  I was expecting it to be warm, but it was scalding; I could only hold my hand in for a few seconds.

From there, we drove down to Texas, on our way to Big Bend National Park right along the border with Mexico.  We stayed the night at a Walmart parking lot along the way.

The next morning we kept driving through Texas.  Big Bend is so remote; we probably drove two full hours between the last town and reaching the park.  It's nice that in Texas, most of the roads we drove on were 75 mph, even though they were normal 2 lane highways.  We arrived at the Big Bend Visitor Center just before they closed at 5pm, just in time to look through the gift shop, fill up our water bottles, and get advice on the best trails to hike.

The first trail we hiked was the Lost Mine Trail.  We went about 1 mile out to a great lookout instead of the entire length at a ranger's suggestion.  Then we did a second hike, the Chisos Basin trail.  Along both trails, there were lots of different types of cacti and other plants that we don't have in Michigan.  

After the hikes, I drove to Sotol Vista which had a nice view of the sunset as we ate our dinner.  I kept driving south, still in the park, to Santa Elena Canyon.  A thunderstorm was rolling in as it was getting dark, so it looked really cool but it was hard to get good pictures.

From there we drove out of the park to the west and found a picnic area to camp at for the night.

In the morning, we drove on to Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  We got there about 1pm, but it was so full that the rangers turned us away because there wasn't any parking available.  We had a picnic lunch at a nice roadside lookout and tried getting into the park again.  This time, there were spots open, so we hiked Devil's Hall trail.  It took us through this canyon/dry riverbed area with views of the mountains all around.  There were also these trees with redish bark which was weird.  The same storm that we saw in on the border that brought lighting in Big Bend also brought hail to the mountains.  There was still some hail in shaded spots which was weird considering it was about 85 degrees out.  After the hike, we drove through some salt flats on the way towards White Sands National Park.

We stopped for some Mexican food in El Paso, right on the border, and got a shower at a Planet Fitness before continuing towards White Sands.  The campsite for the night was a back road on some government land that ended up having some good views of both the mountains and the nearby city of Alamogordo.

In the morning, we got moving to avoid the heat and started driving to White Sands, only about 25 minutes away.  On the way, we passed the world's largest pistachio, but they were closed.

About 10 minutes later, the van started to loose power and we coasted to the edge of the highway.  

Luckily, we were still near Alamogordo and had cell service so it wasn't too long until we had a tow truck on the way.  All the mechanics are closed because of Memorial Day, so he towed us to a motel for now.  In the morning, we'll get the van towed into the shop and hopefully get a loaner car too.  It's not fixed yet, but it still could have been worse.