New Mexico is totally bizarre to me.

This morning we set off from Carlsbad Caverns area to White Sands National Monument.

Within 2 hours we traveled from steppe to Colorado-style lush forest at 8,500 feet to hills/mountains to straight up desert to white fluffy sand dunes. Crazy!

White Sands was awesome! When we were coming down from the mountain, you could see this LONG line of white in the distance. So crazy! I remembered coming as a kid, but I never remembered it being this huge! I spent a few minutes with my mouth gaping at the thought of it…

The drive continued to be awesome …

… Until we stopped in Deming for gas and coffee…

And a pretty crazy dust storm started blowing through… And a lot of tumbleweeds…

We got on the road again and within 2 minutes went from dust storm to rain mixed with dust (aka mud) to rain to HAIL … All this with tumbleweeds rolling in front of us across the road.

We have a video to show you! It’s pretty ridiculous.

The last 100 miles or so in New Mexico are legit desert. Every couple of minutes we had to pull over because the dust flying everywhere was so thick.

We finally made it to Arizona… We kind of thought we never would…

We made sure to stop and see “The Thing” in Dragoon. (Great for our ‘th’ pronunciation practice). Before we got there, we all guessed what we thought it was. I’ll just say none of us were even close! And it was pretty awesome! I was convinced it would be lame, but i thought it was really cool!

We finished the drive to Tucson and even saw some real saguaro cacti along the way!!!! Yay! I love those!

We had dinner at Denny’s and everyone said it was the best meal they had eaten so far on our trip… YIKES! After dinner we “went to a free concert” and came back early.

Oh, fun fact about Arizona: they dot observe daylight savings time. So while our maps said it was in the same zone as New Mexico, we got here and found out that they’re actually in Pacific right now and we gained another extra hour. Sweet!

And all 3 of the girls said they understand Arizona people really well… Much better than they understand Texas people in fact.

Well, my body is still on Texas time even though it’s only 10:15 here… So i’m gettin to bed early! GOODNIGHT! 🙂