Soon after we passed the “Welcome to New Mexico” sign, we turned off the freeway towards our campground. We immediately saw a tumbleweed cross the long road in front of us. We had to laugh, because…welcome to the southwest! Technically the tumbleweed is in this photo but you’ll probably never spot it.

We were welcomed to our campsite with a half a dozen fresh eggs from the owner’s chickens!

Unfortunately, that was not enough to redeem this campground. We spent three nights here, needing to rest up and get some work stuff done. The whole campground was covered in pickers (I think they’re called goat heads) and they were brutal. This is what my shoes looked like after running around with Atlas for a while.

They got in our shoes, our rug, the truck bed, the stroller wheels, and of course every time Atlas went outside he got covered. I used a pair of pliers to pull them out of my shoes and the rug the first night, but after that I just used my bare hands – and have some wounds to show for it.

Other than that, the campground was a dirt parking lot. Not really walkable and not much to see. At one point I took Atlas out in the stroller and very soon after we walked under this bridge a train passed. The train goes by all the time here!

We did manage to fit in some fun. We were near Ute Lake State Park on the reservoir, so we drove out to see the dam. We parked by a massive buoy, a good indication of how low the water level was.

The dam didn’t look like much, but the kid had fun running around.

I’d brought my drone along, and we were very surprised to see how different things looked from the air!

There were a couple guys fishing near the dam, and I’d chatted with them prior to flying (I didn’t want to disturb their peace, but they were cool with it). After, I was going to show them some photos but instead one of them said “Hey I just saw a good sized tarantula headed your way!” By the time I got back to Kyle and Atlas, they’d already found the tarantula and…it was a good sized tarantula! In the wild! So cool!

Since we were already out doing things, I told Kyle I wanted to stop at a railroad bridge we’d passed earlier. The busy railroad looked pretty fragile where it crossed the gorge – but we missed seeing the train by about ten minutes.

I sent the drone up again. These photos don’t really show the scale, but our truck is in both photos.

It was nearly dinner time so we headed home. When we arrived we’d realized that Atlas only had one shoe. He only has the one pair of shoes so it was pretty important that we find it back. We piled into the truck again and drove back to the railroad bridge. Fortunately it didn’t take Kyle long to locate the shoe. We really need to buy a second pair!

We really enjoyed getting out and doing something fun, but we were happy to move on from that campground. We drove through Tucumcari on our way back to the freeway, which is a well-known stop on Route 66. It…didn’t look like much? A half-abandoned small town? But we did see our first real bit of southwest topography when we drove past this butte!

And that was just the beginning. We had fascinating scenery all day on our drive. I think these photos don’t seem terribly exciting, but we are so amped about being out here. We’re so excited to see the things we’ve been dreaming about for a couple years.

We pulled into a casino campground for a quick overnight stop. I think what really struck me about this location is that for the first time we could see in every direction. It was totally cloudless, so the sunset and sunrise weren’t particularly amazing, but I’m missed seeing them both so much. On a boat you can always see the horizon, but we live in the woods now.

We hit the road in the morning and again the topography continued to change. We saw some really beautiful rock formations just as we crossed into Arizona.

Not long after that, we pulled off the freeway into Petrified Forest National Park, where we picked up our America the Beautiful passes (the most exciting thing we’ve bought for ourselves in a long time!). We drove through the park without stopping, because our campground was just south of the southern entrance. We’re staying at the gift shop campground for a couple nights while we explore our first national park!

Random facts that don’t fit anywhere else:
– RVs are notorious for flat tires, which is why we had them all replaced. We did experience our first flat of this trip…on the stroller! All the tires are flat. Thanks, deadly goatheads.