This morning we bid farewell to our KOA Karlsbad Kampground and headed into town for a last coffee with the Blue House Crew. Our plan was to head southwest on Highway 180 through the Guadalupe Mountain pass to El Paso, then to pick up I-10 there and land in Las Cruces for the night. Our route would take us through a familiar patch of New Mexico that we travel every time we fly here from California -- Highway 180 is a 180-mile stretch of road (we think only coincidentally named) that runs from the airport in El Paso, Texas to Carlsbad, New Mexico. 
It takes almost exactly three hours (if you drive 60 MPH, a little less if you take advantage of the posted 75 MPH speed limit), and there is almost exactly nothing between El Paso and Carlsbad. Laurie's brother, Brian, and she one time saw an ostrich. as they came out of the Guadalupe Pass and were looking at miles of flat, arid road ahead of them, running as fast as he could along the highway ahead of a huge thunderstorm, dust kicking up behind him as he ran his fool heart out trying to stay ahead of that rain. Now that was something to see. Nothing like that today though.It is truly amazing to us, after doing this drive several times over 15+ years, that these two towns can be so impossibly far apart with so little in between.
We did stop at the 2/3 mark, a little truck stop named Cornudas, Texas, where someone named May had apparently returned to cook some good homestyle meals for folks passing through this place. Her return was marked on a billboard coming into town. Art went in to get some bottled water, but came out with Aquavita, not the desert spring bottled water advertised on the building. A few of the folks at the Blue House recommended a good way to bypass El Paso -- Route 375 which is an HC (Hazardous Cargo) loop that was built to route hazardous materials around the town of El Paso. It goes through the Bliss Army Base then on up into the Franklin Mountains before coming down right at I-10, northwest of El Paso and only 30 minutes from Las Cruces.
We took that route and it turned out to probably save us close to an hour's travel time. Thank you to Pat, Danny, Ron and Glen for your suggestion. Poor Pep was hitting meltdown stage when we finally pulled in to camp tonight; another hour and he would have been in bad shape. 
We were of course obsessed the entire route with the trucks driving along beside us carrying hazardous materials. We found the Department of Transportation website on our iPhone, which lists all of the hazardous materials that get transported around the U.S. and their corresponding placard codes, and we stayed busy looking those up for all the trucks that were around us. But the views coming over the Franklin Mountains were gorgeous and in the end, no trucks flipped over or exploded or anything like that.. Definitely much more scenic than battling your way through rush hour traffic and the stoplights of El Paso.The good news is that 395 didn't bypass our favorite part of El Paso.
There is a stretch of Highway 180 east of the airport and on the outskirts of town that is just a sea of salvage yards, strip joints, and a fantastical combination of businesses. 
We captured a few photos but none that totally do this piece of road justice.
We'll post a few of the better ones here but will continue to collect them along this stretch of highway as it is so photogenic.Our campsite in Las Cruces is another KOA and another winner. We haven't visited the restrooms yet, but this is very well maintained, and if the guy that checked us in is any indicator, we are pretty confident there has been some attention paid to the bathrooms.
(It took like ten minutes to check in because we went through every detail of the site map, local map, internet access instructions, codes for the bathroom, BBQ, etc.) I don't know why, but when we were making reservations last night for this place, I selected the best site in the place -- actually called "Super Site". It was only $3 more so I figured, what the heck??
Well, we got the puccimanui (sp??) of sites here. Ours is extra wide and we have a concrete pad at the rear end of the site that has a patio table (with tablecloth), four chairs, a gas grill, lights, and well.... a view over the city of Las Cruces that you cannot believe. We aren't the only ones with the view, but we have the goods when it comes to seating and BBQ'ing. Again, the wind.... But hey, they supplied tablecloth clips and we were able to eat out on the patio so we're good.
As we finished up our chicken on the barbie tonight, the sunset was unbelievable. We tried to photograph it and did so with all three cameras we have on board but none quite captured the intensity of the colors, the mountains, or the city lights as they came on below us here. It was absolutely magnificent. We will just have to remember it as well as we can and as long as we can.
Tomorrow we are going to camp in the grand town of Benson, Arizona, but maybe make a side trip to see some cool rocks on the way. We'll see how it goes!
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