El Paso to Roswell

Click here for today's route.

I know, I know, today was supposed to be a long flying day and we were to go to Amarillo and then on to Manhattan, KS. Unfortunately there was a stationary front over Amarillo bringing winds of 20 kts, gusting to 30 kts, so we decided that would not be good. As for Manhattan they were promising thunderstorm after thunderstorm throughout the afternoon. So our longest flying day became our shortest flying day, with a 1.5 hours hop over to Roswell.

Why Roswell? Well, it gets us vaguely going in the direction we want to go, it's a place we've never been to and the winds there were only going up to 15 kts. However, being back in New Mexico after having spent a couple of hours yesterday crossing it makes me feel like we are backtracking. However, my maps assure me we are not.

Not much to report about the flight, though. More nothingness, but we are tired of taking pictures of nothing. If you want to know what a non-picture of nothing looks like, it looks like this:








Roswell is another one of those airports which they use to store airplanes. Huge apron, with jetliners sprinkled all over the place. It's a little intimidating taxiing a small C-172 around these huge things.

We had almost a full day to kill so we decided to explore the local sights. Number one on the list was the Bottomless Lakes State Park. If there was truth in advertising they would have called it
Sink Holes State Park, since the "lakes" are really caved in caverns. One of the sinkholes looked like this:


And this is what Sharon looks like when she stands in front of a sinkhole:


Very nice park, would have been fun to be there when it's not as hot.

The other thing we did was wander around downtown Roswell, where everything is alien-related. Every store has alien window dressing, even when the store has nothing to do with it. The local music store, for example, had drum playing alien dolls.

Even the city is in on this game. Their lampposts look like this:




And that was it for sight seeing. We spent the late afternoon relaxing in the hotel's swimming pool and sauna. Well, Sharon did the sauna. I spent most of my time relaxing in the pool.

A nice dinner at an Italian restaurant to celebrate our wedding anniversary and we were done for the day. By the way, this is what we look like celebrating: