We’re one month into our epic road trip around North America! We celebrated by waking up to a glorious sunset in the morning, and perfect conditions for a day at White Sands National Park, one of the most dog-friendly national parks in the US, as dogs can run freely up and down the more than 712 square kilometers (275 square miles) of glistening sand dunes to their heart’s content. It’s the world’s largest gypsum dune field.
One of the most popular activities at the National Park is to go sandboarding. If you don’t have a board, you can rent one at the gift shop behind the Visitor Center. There are two types–a smaller, circular plastic kind and a wooden board. We chose the latter as it goes faster, although it’s slightly more expensive. We also paid a separate $3 for a bar of wax to use on the board every 2-3 slides, so the total was just under $30.
We headed straight to the back of the National Park, where the ranger said that it was the best place to sandboard. The white gypsum sand looked very similar to the white sand beaches in places like Australia and the Philippines. Parking was easy because we were early–there are spots next to picnic tables with shade above them in a wave design, and toilet facilities as well. We found a fairly steep dune to slide down, and Sheila was loving it–she raced up and down the dunes, and we laughed when she looked like she was running on the spot at a particularly steep point.
We also experimented with different ways to sandboard down the dunes–whether it was standing, lying flat on our bellies, crouching, and Sheila even had a go with Michael to slide downhill! It can be tiring to keep doing this (Sheila was wiped after a while too!) so we chilled on the soft white sand for a while and after having a lovely lunch, we took our eBikes for a ride along the road, to check out the different dunes. By that time the National Park was packed, with a lot of families hanging out, and multiple groups sharing the picnic tables. We had a blast at White Sands, and highly recommend it!
Skipping El Paso
A couple of hours away from White Sands National Park is El Paso in Texas, our next destination. We were running low on Asian groceries so we put a Korean grocery market into Google Maps, which ended up looping us in what seemed like an indirect way to get to El Paso, through a scenic–but very steep–road through the Franklin Mountains. This kind of freaked us out because our RV was pushed to its limits to drive up such a steep incline, and our brakes started making a weird, scary sound! We ended up realizing that we did go in the right direction, but we’ll definitely need to have our brakes checked soon.
After stocking up on miso paste, instant ramen, dry noodles, gochugaru, and drinks, we c checked out Casa de Azucar (Sugar House), a private home that’s been adorned with chiseled and carved cement decorations, the work of one man for many years. We figured we’d then get fast food for dinner, which turned out to be inside Fort Bliss, an active military base, so we promptly were shown out at the checkpoint.
After our days spent in small towns and national parks, driving in El Paso was overwhelming and intimidating–there were so many zigzagging overpasses, and we ended up making a wrong turn twice! After this, we gave up and decided to move on to our next stop, since we were a couple of days behind our plans anyway. When we were living in San Francisco, we never went to shop at Walmart, as they also don’t exist there. But this evening we went for the second time to a Walmart Supercenter–and we both were dumbstruck at how massive they are, so enormous that the aisles have coordinates like a street map (Lisette for example had to call Michael to say she was in “aisle A8” at one point). They literally have everything from groceries to home goods and pharmacy prescriptions, and this one had a McDonald’s inside as well. Lisette loves trying local products, so she bought a prickly pear cactus drink mixed with coconut water–which ended up tasting like a mild watermelon-flavored coconut water.
Leaving El Paso, we drove for as long as we could before finding a rest stop on the side of Route 62. Right before that, Michael yelled out that he had just seen a coyote chasing a small animal, run right in front of the RV as we were flying down the highway. We laughed at the thought of Wyle E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner.
It was a noisy stop as we were right next to the road and could hear cars and trucks zipping past, but as we stopped close to 10pm already it was time for a rest after a big day.
Route Map
[…] two other National Parks dedicated to sand dunes (Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado and White Sands National Park in New Mexico). All of these parks have different hued sand dunes and features, from vivid coral/pink, towering […]