Sandy Days

We visited the following two unique and incredible places that both featured sand:

1. Monahans Sandhills State Park in Texas
2. White Sands National Monument in New Mexico

We camped overnight at Monahans - more on that surprise adventure later. Monahans provides snow sleds or discs to rent which we did for Lucy and Miriam. They also provide wax for you to wax your sled with and to feel a bit like Sparky in Christmas Vacation. Below you can see pics of sliding in the sand! Admittedly, when we had first arrived it was dry and the sledding wasn’t very fast. Then we noted that a big bad cloud was moving in. Sure enough a vicious storm passed through which also included hail and a beautiful rainbow after. Each campsite comes with a permanent roof shelter and so our family sat under it to enjoy the storm. Sliding on the wet sand was much faster! Even after the storm passed the strong wind it had brought with it remained. Earlier (before the storm) we had sat in the sand and chatted with an absolutely fantastic family from New Mexico that we had just met. Michelle and Charlie had sold their house, bought an RV and were travelling the U.S. with 2 of their kids (they have 2 other kids that have grown up). They told us that earlier on they had gone camping before their R.V. and a wind storm so strong blew in that it destroyed all the tent poles of their tent and the tents of the other people they were camping with. Charlie said these parts are known for such strong winds and they are quite common. Thus, Amy and I could see that there was very little chance out tent would not get destroyed. Plus, when we put tent pegs into the sand they wouldn’t stay put so there was no way of keeping the tent from being blown away. So it became time to bring out the two two-person tents that we have with us for the hike into the Grand Canyon later on in the trip. We setup the grownup tent beside the kid tent in a way to provide some shielding from the wind. The kid tent seemed stable but the grownup tent was blowing around like crazy, even with the grownups in it. Thus, we decided to put away the tent fly on our tent and Amy and I slept that way — with about three quarters of the “walls” of the tent being just netting. If Amy and I didn’t both wear glasses it would have been lovely star gazing while falling asleep but truth be told I couldn’t see many stars without corrective lenses. The next day we all enjoyed some fast sledding as the sand was still wet. Amy met a woman at the comfort station that encountered a scorpion when she went to shower.

      White Sands National Monument featured more incredible sand dune landscapes. In case you don’t know, there are are hundreds of “National Monuments” which fall under the umbrella of “National Parks” in the U.S. The place we had lunch (again under a lovely picnic shelter) looked liked it was in the middle of a desert. Dozens of families had come for picnics and sledding in the snow, or I mean sand. We did a b9oardwalk trail (short) and a 1.5 mile nature trail which taught all of us cool things about the ecology and who eats who of this desert. There were freshly shovelled piles of sand on either side of the road which looked like the snow piles in Barrie after the plow goes through, except of course they were made of sand. Enjoy the pics.

At White Sands

Sunrise at Monahans Sandhills

Hiking at White Sands

Sliding at Monahans Sandhills

My dad had a similar picture taken when he was a young man

The girls holding hail stones