The world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport is right here in New Mexico. It is the operational headquarters for Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s American spaceflight company, and where its maiden suborbital spaceflight took place in 2018. You may recall the headlines. Branson beat out Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin launch by just a couple of weeks to become the first billionaire to reach the edge of space.
After Elephant Butte, we headed to Carlsbad Caverns via El Paso, Texas. El Paso’s traffic on I-10 seemed crazy-busy to us compared to Albuquerque or Santa Fe. No surprise, since the El Paso-Juárez area is home to about 2.7 million people, where the Albuquerque metro is about 1.2 million. The area is also home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss, which houses about 11,000 people.
We had been trying to get out on a short trip since April but, well, life got in the way. Finally, in mid-June, we went for a weekend to eastern New Mexico, with Tucumcari as the primary photography target. We had planned for a 3 day/2 night trip to Tucumcari and Conchas Lake, but an unexpected blast-furnace of a heat wave forced us to truncate our plans. Despite the shortened trip, we came back with some good photos.
Last month we ventured out for a short camping trip down to Las Cruces and back. It was still cold here so we wanted to head south where it was a bit warmer. At that time, the state was also just beginning to loosen pandemic restrictions in certain counties, and we were headed for places that actually had 25% indoor dining!