Alamogordo to El Paso

This morning, I was able to stop by White Sands National Park before heading down to El Paso. White Sands is actually not sand at all, but the world’s largest concentration of gypsum. Gypsum (calcium sulfate dehydrate) is used as fertilizer and as the main constituent in many forms of plaster, blackboard or sidewalk chalk and drywall. A crystal form of gypsum, alabaster, has been used by many cultures, including including Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient Rome, the Byzantine Empire, and the Nottingham alabasters of Medieval England for fine sculpture. White Sands is yet another bizarre and other-worldly landscape.

While I am hardly a neophyte to stunning landscapes, the diverse environments I have encountered in only the first six weeks of my journey are truly wondrous. Maybe it is encountering them is close succession, but each time my mind is well and truly blown. Perhaps if more people experienced even a few of these destinations, we, as a society, would be more motivated to be better stewards of this fragile planet.

I then drove the blessedly short hour and a half to El Paso, TX. This marks my entry into the largest state that I am traversing in a week’s time. (California is being split in two; Southern California was my first week and I will return through Northern California.) As such, El Paso (with all due respect to the city and its residents) is basically a one night pit stop before I make the long drive to San Antonio tomorrow. This should be the last of my day-long drives for a while as, once I get to the smaller states, I will be able to stay longer in each location and will have shorter travel times between destinations.

It also marks my entry into more unfamiliar territory. Although I have - yet again - been to all of the cities I am visiting in TX for work, I have never spent time in any of them outside of a work environment.

While I will not have the opportunity to visit anything other than my hotel room in El Paso, I did want to mention an interesting destination I discovered during one of my previous work trips. It will come as a surprise to most that El Paso has a holocaust museum . The museum was founded by Henry Kellen, a survivor who settled in El Paso. It was designed by El Paso artist Victor Mireles and is fully bilingual. If you ever find yourself in El Paso, I recommend a visit.

Tomorrow I make the long journey to San Antonio.

Additional images can be found in the gallery.