This morning I woke up at 6:30 (7:30 back home) and was able to climb one of the sand dunes to have my morning coffee. It was beautiful. I was able to catch those moments of magic light but chose not to pick up the phone to try to capture it. I sat in it.
Once the sun was well on its way, I went back down to the camper to get the kids going. After they got dressed, they grabbed breakfast to eat outside and then run and play on the dunes while I prepared us to go. I was just about done when they came back. I noticed a lot of yellow jackets being attracted to the water that had dripped down from the roof of the camper so there was a little bit of maneuvering to make sure we didn’t get stung. The yellow jackets in TX are definitely bigger. What do they say about Texas??? We hopped across the highway to grab some coffee and gas before hitting the road. However we ran into honeybees this time. What’s up with that Texas??? They kept flying into the truck and every time I got one out, five more flew in. Normally I would be oh it’s one bee but they kept coming! Finally we were able to get them all out of the truck with Bob being the only one stung. Granted he did try to catch it in his mouth. The drive was fairly uneventful and it was fun to see the landscape change. The kids kept ooohing and ahhing…. when I could get them to take their faces away from their devices. The mountains are incredible. We stopped in El Paso to have lunch with Forest. I used to nanny for the Pierce’s and if you saw my post a couple weeks ago at the beach, it was his mom that I shared that has been such a blessing to me.
Luckily my trip through El Paso was at the tail end of his quarantine after getting back from a deployment in Afghanistan and we got to spend a couple hours visiting… in the desert heat. Wow, Texas. You’re hot. Regardless, it was great seeing him and catching up. We headed north to Alamogordo after our late lunch which was only an hour and half drive at that point. I got stopped by homeland security because I was so close to the Mexican border (apparently a normal check point) but I didn’t realize that it was a thing and had a moment of panic that I had headed for the Mexican border instead of Alamogordo. We made it to our rv park in good time but when I went to set up the camper, the lock wouldn’t work to the door that to all the things I needed. Grandpa Brown came over right away and we ended up having to remove Josie’s bed to get to my supplies. I’ll need to call someone to repair the lock tomorrow. I definitely need to get into that compartment. After we got the camper set up, we ran over to the hotel that the other 12 family members were at. It was there that I realized we had crossed over another time zone and I had lost another hour. No wonder I felt so tired. It was cute watching the little girl cousins interact with their big girl cousins. More like young women cousins. We are back at the camper now and will get a good nights sleep so we can explore the place Jeremy wanted to share with us.
