May 2-3, 2022
We averaged 50 miles per hour on the 350-mile drive from Casa Gande, Arizona to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We’re improving at minimizing the swaying of the trailer and are adjusting to the disadvantages of not being able to access the refrigerator or bathroom while in motion.
Our day in Las Cruces started with breakfast in Mesilla, a town of several thousand people south of Las Cruces, founded in 1848. The square there features a basilica, restaurants, and gift shops.
When we visited Mesilla in the fall of 2019 we looked unsuccessfully for a geocache that was supposed to be on the square. We are familiar with caches where the searcher has to lift a lamp post collar. This cache required that either both of the two lower parts of the lamp post be lifted or that the searcher have a very small hand.
A relatively new type of geocache is an Adventure Lab, where the searcher visits multiple (usually 5) locations and answers a question about each. We have found Labs to be an excellent way to explore an area. We completed one around the square which took us by the Fountain Theatre which began operation in the early 1900’s.
We saw that nearby Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park offered several interesting geocaches and had a wonderful time there talking with a ranger of Mexican-American and Navajo heritage who shared stories about language and culture as well as his knowledge of the park.
We found a couple of geocaches, but one area was closed due to a recent fire and other caches hadn’t been found in a while. We did find a cache on the banks of the Rio Grande River.
As we were leaving the park we noticed that a new geocache had not yet been found. We didn’t find it either because the cache owner deliberately posted misleading GPS coordinates. The actual location was near the patio at the park. We chose not to go back for it.
Just before we reached Las Cruces on our drive from Casa Grande we saw a large sculpture of a roadrunner (New Mexico’s state bird) on a hill just off Interstate 10. The sculpture is 20 feet tall and 40 feet long and is the second Recycled Roadrunner built by Olin Calk. The original work was built in 1993 at the city landfill to call attention to consumption and recycling. A new work was built at a rest area in 2001.
0 Comments