White Sands and the Electro-Zap Boardwalk

A quick 150 miles later (yeah, that seems quick now...) and we reached White Sands National Monument. From about 30 miles out as you descend into the valley where the park resides you can see why it's called White Sands. A band of pure white runs across the valley floor, in stark contract to the brown of the desert itself. White sands is, much as it's name implies, a massive area of dunes of pure white sand. Actually, technically it's gypsum, the same stuff that drywall is made of. This is not typically found in large quantities on the surface of the Earth since, much like drywall, it tends to dissolved when it gets wet. Due to the unique geology of this area, however, it has nowhere to flow to, so it stays put.

Despite it being 5:00 or so by the time we drove through the park out to the dunes, and the temperature being only 81 degrees, it felt very hot with the sun beating down from above and reflecting back up from below, so we elected to forgo the longer hikes that the park had to offer. We just climbed to the top of a couple of the dunes near the road and had a look around.

On the way out, we did one of the shorter hikes in the park on a raised boardwalk that went through some of the dunes. It was a short and easy hike, exccept that the boardwalk had a rather unique eco-friendly design. It was made entirely out of recycled plastic, which for some reason had the unique characteristic of building up massive amount of static electricity. If you walked along this boardwalk for more than a couple of dozen feet (more if you touched the plastic railing) without grounding yourself, then a pretty impressive zap awaited you or the back whoever's neck you decided to poke with a finger. Needless to say, having super zapping powers over one another was a a great power with which SHOULD have come great responsibility....... It's a good thing none of us are super heroes.

Since we only spent a couple of hours exploring White Sands, we had time left to continue driving further north. We made it to Truth or Consequences, NM (Yup, thats a real town name...) before we decided to find some accommodations for the night and dinner. Pulling off the highway, we began to 2nd guess our decision since the town looked pretty decent, but was nearly completely deserted. (7:30pm on a Monday night.) Just about the entire town went by without nothing but some really sketchy looking hotels going by, but just as the road looped back to the highway we came across a nice looking comfort Inn. Annette was tired by now (7:30... Yup.) so we decided to skip driving around to find a restaurant and walk 10 feet from the front door of the hotel to Denny's. This turned out to be a good idea, as a torrential lighting storm blew in about 30 seconds after we sat down in the restaurant. A soak on the hotels hot tub rounded out the evening.