The morning came on clear for a change, but we were trying to pack up and get moving on to our next destination, so we didn’t really get a chance to enjoy Caballo Lake S.P. After some delays for reasons to do with credit cards, we got a late start.
We drove north towards Socorro, NM where we planned to turn west. Turned out that we didn’t have enough fuel to make it all the way to Socorro, so we stopped at the only station on the interstate only to find out that they were out of diesel. I used the spare fuel from my 5 gallon can to make sure we got to Socorro where we eventually found a station that we could get into. After fueling up, we headed west on US60. Of course, we ran into more rain and even some small hail along the way.
I guess that I had been lax in my New Mexico research because along the way we found that we were driving right through the middle of the Karl G. Janske Very Large Array (VLA) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Well that was a surprise that we just couldn’t miss, so we pulled onto the road to the Visitor Center. The visitor center had a nice film, narrated by Jodie Foster. You may remember that she starred in the movie Contact that had the VLA as a major part of the story. For those of you that are unaware, the VLA is comprised of 28 radio telescope antennas, each 88 feet in diameter. They are situated like three spokes of a wagon wheel that can extend up to 13 miles from the center. When all linked together, they act as a single radio telescope nearly 27 miles in diameter. If you’re ever in the western New Mexico area, I highly suggest you drop into the visitor center and take the walking tour. Hopefully you’ll get better weather than we did.
After our visit, we continued on into Arizona, raining most of the way, of course, until we reached our destination for the night. Lyman Lake S.P., near St. Johns, AZ has really nice camping facilities. If not for the rain, we would have had a pretty good view of the lake from our site. Hopefully the rain will stop before we have to break camp in the morning and we head over to Dead Horse Ranch S.P. near Cottonwood, AZ. That will be our base camp as we take a couple of days to explore Sedona.
LyndDebTravel 