"Re-positioning Cruise"

While at Elephant Butte State Park, we started checking the weather further ahead. Initially we thought we would go back down through Las Cruces and head towards Silver City (City of Rocks SP) and up to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings. With temps dropping overnight to the high 20's we put the brakes on and will leave it on the list for another time. After checking other places we might want to see,  checking their night time temperatures,  we decided to go back up north in New Mexico and then head west to the Sedona area for a couple of weeks where temps are predicted to stay mid 70's and low 40's overnight. Ray always wanted to go back to Sedona as we were only there for one day four years ago and did not get a chance to see much of anything.

Leaving Elephant Butte bright and early Tuesday morning, we'd ear marked a couple places for an overnight so off we went. Up I-25 to Socorro and then west on Highway 60 past "The Very Large Array" of listening dishes. You might remember them from the movie Contact with Jodi Foster. They looked pretty cool standing tall in the middle of nothingness!

Contact
The 1997 Warner Brothers science fiction movie Contact was filmed at the VLA. It stars Jodie Foster and was based on Carl Sagan's book about Earth's first encounter with an alien civilization.

They move them on these rails.

Further down the road in Datil, was the Datil Well BLM campsite we thought we might stay at but we had made such good time that we decided to carry on and possibly stop in Pie Town NM. They are famous for their pies of course but too bad for us .... the Pie Town Cafe was closed and is only open Friday through Monday. We decided to carry on to Springerville, AZ as we had a few supplies to buy that only Safeway carries .... my tonic water. lol. After a quick stop we were back on the road to stay at the Lyman Lake State Park, a short ways north of Springerville. You can sure tell we had left New Mexico and were in Arizona as the road side garbage was distinctly much worse. We found New Mexico to have the cleanest roadsides and the friendliest people.

It definitely was a much longer driving day then we anticipated but the roads were good with very little traffic so basically smooth sailing on cruise control for Ray. We want to push on to the warmer temps sooner rather than later.

Mostly all by ourselves ... great spot for Freya.

I did a minimal set-up as we were dry camping on the beach for only one night. After Ray had a bit of a lie down to relax, we decided to walk the Petroglyph Trail a short distance from camp to work the kinks out of our muscles and exercise Freya. A very beautiful walk. We only did part of it as we were just too tired.

Their reservoir lake level was not too bad. The boat launch still functions!

It was a great overnight spot. $20 for dry camping but they wanted another $5 to dump ... fortunately we did not need to. We only have a short drive tomorrow so that Ray can be photographed "Standing On the Corner in Winslow Arizona"!