Globe, AZ

If you look at a map (and why would you do that?), you would see that we did not go through NM and AZ as planned in the last post.  The route we planned up through Albuquerque looked like it had too much bad weather - even snow, so we decided to cut across the southern part of both states.  Shortly after we left Fort Stockton this morning, we headed north off I-10 to check out Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  Thought it would be kind of cool to add another National Park to our collection. It's just a little south of Carlsbad Caverns, but we had been there some time ago.  Guadalupe is mountain range rising out of the prairie in western Texas.  It's one of those parks which you can't drive through, just around.  If you want to do any exploring of the Park, you hike it.  Needless to say, that ain't in our plans!  Neat visitor center and beautiful view of Guadalupe Mountain - elevation somewhere around 8500'.

After we left the Park, we headed west to El Paso on state highways and took another one to bypass the metropolitan area.  The bypass - Route 375 - went past Fort Bliss and then went through some interesting passes to get us back on I-10 north of El Paso.  Headed out on I-10 and close to the western border of New Mexico, we headed diagonally northwest toward Phoenix.  We figured since we weren't going to Tucson, there was no sense in taking I-10 because it dips south through Tucson.  Hwy 70 had no traffic and is a pretty straight road through farming country, cattle ranches and cotton fields.  The good thing is the lack of traffic.  We gained an hour since we went from the Central Time Zone to Mountain Time Zone.

Globe is a mining town - some copper and some silver.  Tomorrow we head over to Phoenix and then up to Kingman.  We're staying at Laughlin for a couple of days before heading home.  Maybe we'll get a chance to play some golf.  Today the weather was rainy off and on until almost the end of the day when the sun came out and the temperature soared to 55 degrees (eat your hearts out in North Dakota, New York, and New England.