We head north to Roswell (supposedly the place where aliens with bald, teardrop shaped heads and huge eyes crash landed). As we drive west to Ruidoso (home of the Annual All American Quarter Horse Race for the best quarter horses in the entire U.S.), through unpopulated, mountainous terrain with no services, we almost run out of gas. The fuel pump is immersed in the gasoline, lubricated by it and cooled by it, so it is protesting by the time we fill up. We stay in Ruidoso that night. The next day the gasoline pump is still making itself heard, but we drive to Ruidoso Downs and onto the grounds to look over the track. Roswell and Ruidoso are both places we had heard a lot about and just wanted to say we had been. 
We drive over a 7,935 foot high pass coming out of Ruidoso to Alamogordo, a bit bigger town, where we buy a spare fuel pump and a screw gun to carry with us in case we need to do an exchange along the road somewhere. But, the miles seem to make the old pump feel better and it gets quieter as we drive. We'll be watching the tank level a bit more closely from now on :-). 
White Sands, New Mexico is our next stop - another almost unbelievable natural phenomenon. A piece of that same ancient sea, now an almost dry lake, sits upon a gypsum deposit (the stuff drywall is made of). Since gypsum is water soluable the lake water is saturated with it. Along the edges as the water evaporates, it leaves gypsum crystals - very tiny, and very light crystals that swirl away in every breeze to form these famous brilliant white dunes. We made a picnic to eat at one of the picnic/play areas the park service keeps snowplowed out of the middle of the constantly shifting, slowly moving dune field (don't you Minnesota people feel a bit like it's ice fishing time on a local lake?). Gary needs a nap so we park near some of the bigger dunes and I hike off on one of the marked, interpretive trails. From the tops one can see way out over the dunes and they go on like a snow field with occasional patches of vegetation, clear to the horizon in one direction. But, behind me, it is amazing to see the very definite, scalloped line where the white dunes are encroaching into the much darker greys and greens of the desert landscape. And I just had to have a picture of the wonderful, totally desert plants growing right out of the white sand as if to prove it is really sand.