Sidehack Trip.....Roswell / Ruidoso, New Mexico

Finally a three day weekend and a little time for a sidehack trip! Spent part of last Sunday preparing the BMW. Reset all valves, reset points, changed oil, and replaced the 2 year old battery. The battery hasn't been taking a proper charge for quite some time and the plates looked funky. Nice to have a functioning, charged battery again!
Saturday morning dawned a wee bit foggy and overcast. We headed out around 9:30 AM and the fog burned off within the first 1 1/2 hours.

We headed south on highway 207 through Panhandle Texas, crossing I-40 going south. Kind of an eerie looking morning with the fog......

An old decrepit barn, ready to fold up.....in another hundred years or so.....

Texans' have a thing about burying cars...hence the "Cadillac Ranch", which is simply ten or so old Caddies with their noses buried.....here we have the "Bug Ranch", I guess.... On a previous trip we saw a row of old combines with their asses pointing skyward.......

Heading south on 207 we passed through the eastern side of Palo Duro Canyon...very pretty area with a lot of red rock and dirt......

South of Palo Duro we turned east on highway 145 which took us towards New Mexico....It was over a hundred of mostly straight miles through cotton fields, corn fields and cows......
I thought I was lost for a while but then this sign straightened me out.....Earth...that a way!

We had a motel reservation a few weeks in advance...luckily so as there was a big AKC Dog Show going on in town. Looked like everything but the roach motels were filled. The "Aliens" are ever present all over Roswell.

Sunday morning we headed out on a seldom traveled back road highway 246 which heads west out of Roswell towards the Capitan Mountains. This was a great route and we saw maybe 5 cars in 100 miles. Ran into a little rain squall by noon or so.....The mountains aren't too impressive when approaching, but actually they are quite a large range of mountains.

We crossed down towards Ruidoso N.M. and it was like riding into a Metropolitan area. Traffic was thick and people everywhere. Looks like the area is a huge tourist area.

A lot of thunderstorms everywhere around us.....a beautiful area and it is built up with a lot of homes.......

This hillside place was on stilts.

We ran over to Lincoln N.M. which is where "Billy the Kid" was jailed and waiting to be hanged when he escaped the jail and slipped out of town. Somewhat of a tourist trap type town, but it does have a lot of old 1800's buildings which have been preserved......Above, we are racing ahead of a pile of storms, headed back towards Roswell.....some of the storms were very heavy, but we only got caught in a few squalls......

"Ruidoso Downs" is on the map......ended up that there was a huge horse racing track and a massive Indian Casino.....It looked like a zoo and so many people were trying to get in that the Police were directing traffic in after a car accident occurred while someone was trying to turn in.

I'm always looking close for road debris while traveling so I always spot the tarantulas as they wander across the road. This was a fairly big fellow...saw one today that was quite a bit larger....

Had about 100 miles of back roads today.....lots of cows and ranches.....saw about 10 cars in a hundred miles.

Stopped in Fort Sumner and went and checked out "Billy the Kids" final resting place....seems that people keep stealing his headstone...once it was found in Texas and another time it was found in California......they have it pretty well caged in now. We ran straight back to Fritch and arrived at 5:30PM. Just missed another huge system of storms heading home. Didn't get a drop of rain today, but must have killed hundreds of grasshoppers....I had bunches of them cooking on the engine cylinders when we got home.........