Alamogordo NM
June 2 – 9, 2024
After leaving Van Horn in TX we headed north into New Mexico on the US-54 and spent a week staying at Alamogordo / White Sands KOA Journey. It was an OK little park, dusty and a bit cramped, but we appreciated the pool! It was close to the middle of town and nice and quiet. We would stay there again if we found ourselves back in the area but we would definitely fork out for one of the larger sites that have a better aspect for keeping out of the blazing afternoon New Mexico sun.
Alamogordo is a quiet town with a surprisingly large population of about thirty-thousand thanks to the Holloman Airforce Base next door. We were camped in the middle of town and it was a great town for riding the bicycle around – wide streets and very little traffic.
A good day trip from Alamagordo is to Cloudcroft in the mountains behind the city. The road takes you from the sandy desert floor a few thousand feet up into the alpine forest which was about 30 degrees (F) cooler than where we were staying down in Alamogordo. We indulged in some apple and cherry pie from one of the several bakeries in the main street, very cute little town.
There is a great view from the road on the way up and down the mountain. it’s always hard to capture the scale of these vistas in a photograph but there are several points on the way down the mountain where you can see right down to the desert floor. In the photo below the gypsum sands of White Sands National Park and the White Sands Missile Range are glowing in the sun.
And don’t miss McGinn’s big pistachio on the way back into Alamogordo. Good priced pistachios in all the flavors! Australians love big things – it was all the rage in the 80s and 90s and most Aussies have good childhood memories of the Big Banana at Coffs Harbor – but I don’t think we ever had a road side attraction quite as yonic as this….
White Sands National Park is famous for being the world’s largest deposit of gypsum sand. (Apparently only recently anointed with National Park status – Donald Trump made it part of the NPS in 2019!) The gypsum deposits were formed long ago from water leaching the minerals out of the surrounding mountains and down into the valley floor where there is nowhere for the water to go – it evaporated and left the gypsum behind. White Sands is a one-day trip in our opinion, but very much worth a look. The white sand is beautiful (and blinding) and the park has a diverse plant life that was flowering spectacularly while we were there.
Santa Fe NM
June 9 – 22, 2024
Moving further north and still trying to escape the June desert heat, we pulled into Santa Fe New Mexico for a couple of weeks, staying at Santa Fe Skies RV Park. Great family-owned RV park on the outskirts of Santa Fe, up on a hill with an almost 360 view of the area around – excellent spot to view the summer storms rolling in from the mountains. And an incredibly mild climate! From the blazing desert sands of Alamagordo it was a welcome change of temperature up in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Excellent spot to watch some wild storms roll in over the mountains.
Santa Fe is an art town and has over 250 galleries in the city. We are not art people so we did not go to any! But if you’re into art… apparently this is the place to be. Actually, the Santa Fe Skies RV park where we were staying was full of art – outdoor pieces placed around the park with a description and name of the artist – that’s as close as we got to an art gallery! The city of Sant Fe and surrounding region has many Spanish-style and ‘Pueblo Revival’ buildings in recognition of the region’s indigenous people and the early Spanish settlers. It makes for a very beautiful city that is sympathetic to its mountainous and rocky surroundings.
Up the road from Santa Fe is Los Alamos – host to the Manhattan Project – where the first atomic bombs were developed during World War II. The town still hosts the Los Alamos National Laboratory which remains a nuclear research center. We had seen the Trinity test site when we were down in Alamagordo (there’s nothing much to see – just the desert) so of course we needed to come and have a look at Los Alamos. There are a number of historic sites around the town, including the old front gate of the national laboratory and a number of houses and buildings where the original Manhattan project team lived and worked.
Albuquerque is about a 45 min drive back down the highway from Santa Fe and we took a trip for lunch and a look around. We particularly just wanted to go to the chicken shop that played “Los Pollos Hermanas” in Breaking Bad – it is an actual chicken shop called Twisters – and it has some memorabilia and tributes to Breaking Bad inside the restaurant.
We would have had lunch at Twisters if we had not already had some (very bad) BBQ in the park an hour earlier.
We pulled out of Santa Fe a day early as the next leg of the journey into Colorado was going to be a pretty long day and we had spied a Harvest Hosts stay at Black Mesa Winery and Cider on the way. It was only about 45 min north of Santa Fe, so didn’t save that much time, but it was fun to get out and boondock in someone’s winery for the night – hadn’t done that for a while!
La Veta CO
June 23 – 30, 2024
It is hard to describe the vastness of the countryside we passed through between Taos up to Costilla in NM, and then onto Fort Garland and La Veta in Colorado. The picture below doesn’t capture it at all…. the way the mountains meet the river and these huge ravines open up the earth as though threatening to swallow livestock and cars that might pass too close. It’s very impressive countryside and amazing how quickly the desert and rock of New Mexico transitions into the rich agricultural fields of Colorado.
After a pretty steep pass from Fort Garland up through the mountains we descended into the little town of La Veta CO for the week. What a charming little town! We absolutely loved our week here. We stayed at We RV Champions of La Veta – and we highly recommend this campground – particularly if like us, you’re lucky enough to snag Site #1 under the enormous oak tree with the beautiful grass area.
La Veta is a town that has managed to keep its oldy worldy agricultural charm yet also spruce itself up to cater for the tourists passing through here on the way to Great Sand Dunes and Spanish Peaks. We thought it was a charming little town. Two things not to miss while you are in town: One is the general grocery store – Charlie’s Market – that still has a proper milk bar that makes sandwiches and milkshakes to order. What’s better than having a fresh made ham and salad sandwich with a milkshake in the main street for lunch? Nothing is better than that. The second thing you need to do in La Veta is make a booking at the extremely good Italian restaurant Stiano’s – I don’t know how a town with a population of 860 people has a restaurant that makes food this good, but they do.
There are actually a number of places in town that looked great for eating and drinking. Next time we’re staying for two weeks to spread ourselves around a bit more.
Like other out-of-towners in La Veta, we had come here as a base camp for visiting Great Sand Dunes National Park. What an incredible National Park… these enormous red sand dunes just rise out of the valley floor in the middle of seemingly luscious, green fields. The dunes at White Sands in New Mexico were expected – we were in the desert. But the dunes at Great Sand Dunes in Coloroado are absolutely not expected – you are travelling through fields of green and wildflowers, turn a corner and then there is a gigantic red sand dune in front of you.
Although it does not look or feel like the desert, the ever-present cacti (which were flowering!) are a reminder that this region is actually a high desert and not quite as lush as the greenery makes out. It’s a pretty amazing site to see.
Colorado Springs, CO
June 30 – July 14, 2024
Let’s get the crappy part out of the way – Garden of the Gods RV Resort in Colorado Springs is a gravel parking lot and absolutely not worth the money. However, it is in a good location in town and frankly, we didn’t see any other RV parks that looked much better in downtown Colorado Springs. There is also so much to see in this area of Colorado you should not have any reason to be sitting around the RV park all day. Two weeks was barely enough to see everything (particularly when you are tied to your computer during the week days) and if you like hiking, you could spend a month easily. We only hit the highlights….
The Garden of the Gods RV Resort is right next door to…. The Garden of the Gods State Park – who would have guessed?! The state park is actually within walking distance of the campground – which was fabulous for after-work walks with the dogs – and it has miles and miles of walking and biking trails winding through the large red rock formations. You could definitely devote a couple of days or more to all the trails and vistas here.
Pikes Peak was absolutely stunning. We loved it so much we went twice – driving ourselves in the truck one weekend and catching the train the next weekend. We were lucky the day we went in the truck because I had failed to notice you needed a timed entry pass. After waiting in line for 20 min anyway and getting to the ticket booth, the lovely young ranger let us through with a wink wink and a treat for the dogs and up the mountain we went. Lucky us! The peak of Pikes Peak is over fourteen thousand feet and you can drive yourself all the way to the top where there is a fabulous visitors center with breathtaking 360 degree views in all directions. The drive and the train trip are equally spectacular in their own ways, but if you get a bit queasy with heights and tight hair-pin bends when you’re driving, I recommend taking the train! July was also a beautiful time to see the wildflowers on the mountain.
After coming back down off Pikes Peak, Justin was on the hunt for meat pies or pasties. (We get hopeful in areas of the USA like Colorado that there may have been enough Australian or UK visitors to inspire variations of pastry-wrapped meat in the local cuisine.) So that’s how we accidentally found ourselves in Victor – the bakery advertised they had pasties. Victor is absolutely worth a day trip! If nothing else than for some beautiful scenery. It is an old gold mining town set in the mountains that has much of its mining past still on display in the fields around town. We thought it was pretty fascinating. If you do visit Victor, plan to have lunch at the Gold Camp Bakery in town – they have lots of goodies – including pasties.
Another fun day trip from Colorado Springs was Royal Gorge Bridge. The bridge was built in the 1920s as a tourist attraction – which it remains today – but it provides a spectacular view of the gorge. The bridge sways so much I had to carry Howard across it! The surrounding park has a flock of big horn sheep which were cool to see up close and a gondola across the gorge in case walking the wobbly bridge doesn’t take your fancy.
We were in Colorado Springs for Justin’s 50th birthday and enjoyed some pretty fancy pizza at the White Pie Pizzeria. Definitely recommend for dinner and drinks if you are looking for a nice night out somewhere in Colorado Springs. Happy half century Juzzo!!
Although worth mentioning is that if you are a bread snob, there is a fabulous French bakery in old town, La Baguette, with delicious bread and naughty patisserie treats. (Even if you’re not a bread snob – I highly recommend trying one of their eclairs).
Loveland CO
July 14 – 28, 2024
We stayed a couple of weeks in Loveland in a HipCamp which was someone’s backyard in the center of town. It was really perfect spot as the property was on one acre – fully fenced – and the owner was barely there. So we had the place to ourselves and the dogs were able to be off the leash.
There are two items to note in the photo below: (1) Justin put his plumbing skills into practice to allow our sewer hose to reach the sewer drain at this property which was about 35 feet away from the trailer parking spot (Justin was very pleased about this); and (2) after about six months atop our trailer – and having never been used for its intended purpose – the flag pole was sold to a happy bidder in Loveland. Thank god.
We came to Loveland mainly because I have a work colleague who lives nearby. So apart from some socializing and cow watching, we didn’t do much here except enjoy the coffee shops in downtown Loveland and Fort Collins. Of course, Rocky Mountain National Park is not far away but I wasn’t able to get a timed entry pass for the weekend we were there so we will need to come back again to do that one!
Justin’s cousin Matt came to visit us in Loveland. He lives in Shanghai, China but was in Los Angeles and decided to come and stay with us for a few days which was lovely. He braved the pull-out couch in the trailer and spent a lot of time with Justin at the Waltzing Kangaroo meat pie shop in Fort Collins.
Golden CO
July 28 – August 10, 2024
The stay at Golden was originally planned as somewhere to be close to Denver airport, as I had bought us tickets to the Newport Jazz Festival for Justin’s 50th birthday and we had a weekend away planned without the pets. We were parked at Dakota Ridge RV Park which was a comfortable, basic little RV park in a convenient location to reach Denver, Golden and Boulder.
So we didn’t see very much of the Golden area and didn’t even go into downtown Denver. Will have to come back another time. Colorado was certainly a highlight of all the states we had visited so far and if we needed to settle down again, it would be high on the list of places we would choose. Nice climate, lovely people, spectacular scenery and a fabulous outdoor lifestyle.
our long way home 
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