White Sands National Monument

On Sunday, we decided to visit White Sands National Monument.

There were so many cars stopped at the visitor center (many parked in the long spaces reserved for RVs) that we decided to skip the visitor center and just drive into the park. Here we are waiting in line to get to the entry gate to show Carl's Golden Age Passport.

Dwayne and I had visited back in 2015 (https://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2015/12/we-were-hoping-to-avoid-snow.html) and I remembered how much it looked like we were entering an area with snow...

People enjoying the white snow, errhh, sand!

A couple of miles in, the road is no longer asphalt but hard packed sand.

We stopped at a picnic area...

We had looked carefully from the main loop road and thought it would be big enough for us to turn around...

And it was... but doesn't it look like Gracie is in an area with packed snow?

Miss Kitty in the front window (very dirty window) enjoying the sunshine!

Obligatory selfie with Gracie in the background!

Another view of Gracie in the picnic area.

Looking across the sand dunes / hills.

We weren't getting as much power from our solar panels as we had hoped, so went up to see if they were dirty -- they were...

So we took some water and a squeegie up and cleaned them... unfortunately, it didn't make much difference in the solar collection - we think we were getting shading on the panels from the A/C units and the sun is so low in the sky at this time of the year (almost the lowest of the year) that it is hard to get good charging unless we stopped and raised the panels.

A view of the ripples in the sand...

Another sand ripple picture.

We walked over to another area of the picnic area and talked to some folks about whether they were having success sand-disc sledding (they were not) - a selfie there...

And.. .another selfie with Gracie in the far background (above Carl's head to the left) -- the sand looks more tan in this shot, but the sun was almost directly behind us.

A shot of the lower part of the picnic area -- I don't remember this area being in the National Monument when we visited in 2015.

A family playing on a sand dune - the little girl made a "sand angel" and then her grandpa covered her with sand, while some others were successfully sledding.

Carl had never been to White Sands, so he enjoyed being introduced to it, and I enjoyed visiting it again!