Gerald Champion Hospital - NM #3, TX #4

Yesterday was supposed to be our longest stretch of road on this drive across the states, with the Kansas/Nebraska crossing a close second. We navigated almost 600 miles across Southern Arizona, dipping into Texas and then back up into New Mexico, place of my birth.

A note about Texas: We go to Houston and San Antonio once or twice a year to visit family. The kids hunt for frogs in the early evening and we fill our bellies with as much Tex-Mex as we can. So, we decided to just cross the border into Bush Country for a picture under the Welcome to Texas sign and call it good.

Peanut and I discussed the meaning of nostalgia as we drove across the different looking desert scenes. She was still feeling sick and limp in the backseat, and I told her about a time, at her exact age, when I was sitting in the backseat on this same stretch of road, with heat stroke. More than the memory of being sick, I remember the look on my sister's face and the panic in her voice as they searched for an Ice House. They finally found one but it only had big blocks of ice, so they chipped pieces off with a finger nail file and hand fed me.

We also passed the place between Lordsburg and Deming where, at Little Man's exact age, my other sister and I were in a terrible car crash with our aunt and cousins. My aunt lost the use of her legs, one of my cousins lost her life and I ended up in a cactus, the needles scarring my left side into adulthood. Funny thing how your body remembers such life tragedies, and I felt the location in my gut before we even realized we were there.

On a brighter note, I also had a memory rush back of driving to the Sonic at the edge of town and heading to White Sands with my older sister and all her high school friends. This has to be one of the coolest places on Earth. I never tire of coming here and believe me, I've been here a lot. It's out in the middle of nowhere, the bottom of an ocean without the water or fish. Pure white sand for miles in the middle of the brown desert. I knew it would be a highlight for the kids and it was. They couldn't accept that it wasn't snow until they actually stepped into its fluff. Climbing and running and rolling, filling their hair with the soft sand. Magic.

We had been feeding Doodle digestive biscuits for a couple of days, but I never expected to hear Grandma yelling at me across the dunes, "Curly! Curly Top! You better come check this out!!" Doodle, I'm pleased to announce left her deposit at the bottom of one of the dunes.

White Sands is about 20 minutes outside Alamogordo, NM. I can't imagine it's a priority stop on most people's map, but Doodle couldn't wait to see the hospital I was born in. Why? Because it's pink, I promised her. Unfortunately, we learned they tore it down years ago and built a new one, by the same name, up on the mountain. Doodle lost interest, but when Peanut's fever went up instead of down and she couldn't swallow even a drink, I took her to E.R. in the new dig. Grandma was sure she had Strep, but alas it was just a wicked case of tonsilltis. We were there a couple of hours and I watched her drift in and out of a fever sleep, "I love horses! I said I loooooove horses!" We decided to cancel Carlsbad Caverns today, hang out here in this nothing-to-do place and force her to rest. She's mad as hell.