After spending most of our one full day at Brantley Lake State Park doing laundry, we got in touch with our friends Todd and Tatiana, who were driving west from Florida to their home in Albuquerque. Our original plan had been to head from Brantley Lake to somewhere near White Sands and meet up with them there, but they were traveling more slowly than anticipated, and weren’t going to make it to White Sands before the end of the weekend, and Tatiana had to be home by Sunday night to work on Monday. So, we took a look at the weather report for Santa Fe and Albuquerque for the end of the week, and saw that temperatures were supposed to remain mostly above freezing. Santa Fe was on our list of capitals to visit, but we had planned to catch it later when the weather was warmer. But, since we wanted to see Todd and Tatiana, and the weather was supposed to be good, we decided that we would head for Santa Fe and then meet T&T at their home in Albuquerque on Sunday late in the day.
We looked at the route and realized that Roswell, NM, the home of the UFO Museum, was right on our path to Santa Fe. We booked at night at Bottomless Lakes State Park which is very near Roswell, and made plans to spend the next day in Roswell and the night at Bottomless Lakes SP before heading for Santa Fe the following day. Things went mostly to plan, although we woke up to 15 degree temperatures that morning and found that our pipes had frozen. We had intentionally not hooked up the city water, and had stayed at the campground with electricity so we could run the heater all night, but 15 is below the threshold where we can keep the outside walls above freezing, even with the heater running all night. We always keep a jug of water in the camper, so we managed to get breakfast and get cleaned up despite the frozen pipes, and decided to let Mother Nature warm up the pipes through the course of the day.
We had beautiful ice crystals on our windows. It was a shame the ice was also in our pipes.
Roswell was less than two hours from Brantley Lake, and we had no trouble finding the UFO Museum right on the main drag through town, so we pulled into their parking lot in time to have a quick lunch before touring the museum. No matter what you think of UFOs, the museum is worth the $7 admission fee just for the experience of talking to the people who run it and watching and listening to the other visitors. At this point, it is more of a shrine to conspiracy theories than UFOs and aliens, but it’s interesting to see how they’ve chosen to present their case. We read some of the exhibits, until we realized that most of the plaques said the same thing, just written by a different writer, and then went to a lecture by an 81-year old man who has been researching the Roswell case for 33 years. His findings aren’t especially compelling, and while I don’t disbelieve in UFOs or aliens, his presentation didn’t do anything to push me in that direction. But, it was fun to look around the audience and see people nodding and hmmmming.
When you enter the museum, they ask you to plug in the location where you live, and then a red dot will appear so other visitors can see. It doesn’t look like the museum is much of a destination for Mexicans and Central Americans.
The Maya left a lot of evidence that proves extra terrestrials have been visiting Earth for a very long time.
How could you not want to see what’s inside that building?
We left the UFO Museum and went in search of a Buddy propane heater since we don’t want a repeat of the frozen pipes experience. We justified it because the Buddy Heater gets hotter than the little electric heater, and, with the propane heater, we can boondock and have heat all night. We hadn’t bought one before because we kept thinking that we would be driving into warmer weather, but since it seems that we may never escape the cold, the $100 investment would be worth it. We were scheduled to stay at Bottomless Lakes State Park that night, which also had electric hookups, so we didn’t take the time to get everything we would need to run it, and Tom could come up with a plan and a list of what he needed before finishing the project.
Bottomless Lakes State Park was about 15 minutes from downtown Roswell, and very easy to find. We really liked the park since it was in a nice setting next to one of the larger bottomless lakes, which are really gypsum sinkholes, and the pull through spots were enormous and made parking on the level very easy. Our pipes had defrosted during the day, but the pump wasn’t working, but since we also had city water we didn’t worry about that and Tom decided it was probably a blown fuse which he could fix in the morning; that turned out to be exactly the case. We took a hike through the park and the campground past a few of the lakes before settling in for the night.
Bottomless Lakes State Park was about 15 minutes from downtown Roswell, and very easy to find. We really liked the park since it was in a nice setting next to one of the larger bottomless lakes, which are really gypsum sinkholes, and the pull through spots were enormous and made parking on the level very easy. Our pipes had defrosted during the day, but the pump wasn’t working, but since we also had city water we didn’t worry about that and Tom decided it was probably a blown fuse which he could fix in the morning; that turned out to be exactly the case. We took a hike through the park and the campground past a few of the lakes before settling in for the night.
The next morning we took another short hike on a boardwalk through the wetlands, before heading for Santa Fe.
