The big national park trip that I’ve already been writing about for the past few months was a huge, planned ordeal. We worked things out for months to make that trip happen. There were reservations, flights, cancellations, and all sorts of bureaucratic maneuvering we had to accomplish to get to where we wanted to. It made the whole trip feel like a culmination more than anything else.
Our next national park trip was not like that!
Elizabeth and I did have plans for a fairly significant amount of time to go to White Sands National Park in October of 2021. We felt guilty about dumping Scipio at doggie daycare so much during the summer, so the fact that White Sands was a dog-friendly park made us feel better. We planned on going the weekend of the OU/Texas game so that we could drive down Friday and spend the entirety of Saturday in the park – hotel booked in Alamogordo and everything. The most exciting part was the camping – White Sands only offers backcountry camping within the sands themselves, and only ten spots at that. We were going to get there at 6:00 a.m. to secure our spot.
So of course White Sands closed down backcountry camping mere weeks before we were supposed to visit.
Elizabeth and I were left scrambling to find a substitute trip we could take our dog on. The natural solution was Great Sand Dunes National Park, which not only kept with the sand theme but also was dog-friendly. The only problem was that I’d tried to find sites at the Pinon Flats campground before, and they were basically always full. This was again true when we looked at the OU/Texas weekend. Elizabeth, a veteran of the long war to get matching campsites at Yellowstone, was given the task of continuing to check the recreation.gov website until we got a site. It took several weeks for an opening to become available, but once it did, Elizabeth tackled it with her usual aplomb. I was going to my 17th national park. Furthermore, Elizabeth texted her multitudinous cousins in the Denver area and asked if they wanted to make the short trip around the Sangre de Cristos to spend the weekend with us at Great Sand Dunes. We received positive responses from Michael, Irene, and Charlie, so Scipio was going to have some company.
The rest of the planning followed naturally. If we were driving to Great Sand Dunes, outside of Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, we would take 40 west and then cut across the northern panhandle toward I-25 in Raton. If we left after I finished class on Thursday, Elizabeth and I could make significant ground and get to Great Sand Dunes earlier on Friday. Then we could stay through Sunday morning and drive back. For a national park that looked fun, but not necessarily like the largest park ever, I thought 48 full hours should be enough to see what I needed to see.
On Thursday, October 7, I bid Elizabeth farewell and headed up to the NWC. My Thursday morning convection class with Howie Bluestein was always the bookend to the week. This time, I looked forward to 11:15 a little more eagerly than most. Howie, always the Colorado lover, wished me luck in finding some decent fall color. I had devoted most of my “planning” energy to finding out whether we would experience peak fall color. The verdict seemed to be that we would probably be a bit early, but still see some very nice yellow aspens. Beyond that, I had laid out some loose plans for things to do during the day. I also wanted to just view the Milky Way from the dunefield, which boasts some of the darkest skies left in North America.
When I left class, I eschewed my Tuesday/Thursday tradition of working at the NWC for a few hours and getting lunch. Instead, I returned home and put in a heroic hour-long effort packing last-minute items that remained on our list but had yet to be assimilated into the pile in our living room. Elizabeth in the meantime spent her Thursday morning running last-minute errands, including a roundabout trip around Norman trying to get a small nail in one of her car’s tires removed. The patch would not be the last Elizabeth car issue we dealt with.
Eventually she finished her errands and came back with a different problem in tow: Scipio. Since his great adventure to DC last Christmas, the dog’s car anxiety had only increased. In an effort to make our trip a little more bearable, Elizabeth had signed him up for a morning at Fetch and Stay. Maybe if he spent his time playing with other dogs, he would sleep in the backseat all afternoon. Early results bore out the method! Elizabeth propped up his bed with pillows I’d jammed in the car in my last-second packing burst, and Scipio fell asleep before I was even on I-35. I put my phone on Bluetooth mode and listened to one of my favorite podcasts of 2021, the Solid Verbal. Notably, both Ty and Dan picked OU to cover as small favorites in the Red River Shootout. Nice!
Things started to get a little bit off the rails once we stopped at the Love’s in Elk City for gas and a change of driver. I moved into the backseat with Scipio, and at first he felt back asleep like a sweet little lamb:
But soon, the two-lane highways west of Elk City proved a bit too much for his car anxiety. The sound of cars whipping past us at 70 mph just one lane over kept Scipio shaking like it was 10 degrees inside the car. It took all I had to keep him reasonably comfortable and to keep him from jumping over luggage trying to watch the cars zip by. The mood inside the car turned slightly tense, if I may be frank. It was only after a long stretch of terse panhandle driving that the dog settled down, just in time for us to stop for dinner.
Elizabeth’s pre-trip craving was Taco Bell, which fortunately had exactly one location in our route across the Panhandle. Mobile ordering wasn’t working in Dumas, which figured to slow us down slightly on our trip to the bustling metropolis of Clayton, New Mexico. I volunteered to walk Scipio at a park (McDade Park) in town if Elizabeth ordered and picked up the food from Taco Bell Dumas, which she graciously offered to do. In the meantime, I introduced Scipio to the concept of a playground. He didn’t love things like the rock climbing wall where I climbed out of his reach, but the playset was a bit of a hit:
Eventually, Elizabeth returned from her adventure to find Taco Bell. Whatever sodium-laden creation I’d wanted, they hadn’t understood, so the upshot was I had to settle for a different sodium-laden creation. Elizabeth was super concerned that would bother me, which, lol. I will eat any Taco Bell because all Taco Bell tastes exactly the same. We ate at a picnic table under a pavilion while Scipio enjoyed his dinner supplemented with whatever was on the ground within reach.
I started driving again after dinner, squinting to avoid the setting sun. Elizabeth had to attend one of her classes for grad school at Millersville virtually (it was a resume help session, so apparently she didn’t need to, but felt like she should). Scipio could really have derailed the drive here. But instead, as a measure of his spitefulness towards me, he fell back asleep and wasn’t heard from for the rest of the trip. Elizabeth lost service before his class was over, since there really isn’t a whole lot in the far northwestern Panhandle. However, Michael Facetimed her to plan our trip once she got service back, which probably helped obscure the fact from Elizabeth that we were arriving in Clayton. Before she even realized, we were on the main highway through town, stopping at our Quality Inn.
Now, I’m going to level with you. Quality Inns are usually just fine. Elizabeth and I have had pretty good success with them in the past, particularly one in Artesia, New Mexico a few years prior on our way to Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns. But this one was a dump. It was an obvious dump, and the entire experience only got worse with time. First of all, the parking lot was pretty dumply. The weird lion statue were pretty dumply. Our room wasn’t terrible, but the backyard area to walk Scipio was primo dumply. And the train tracks through town? No more than 100 yards away. The first road crossing trains coming westbound would reach? Right behind us, meaning the first we’d hear of trains would be horns blaring… all night long.
I put the Rams/Seahawks game on as a distraction from the general dumpliness of our situation, and tried to find some positivity to infuse into the evening. Elizabeth wanted ice cream so I looked up dessert places in Clayton. There were literally none. Clayton forever went on a list in my mind in that moment. We improvised as best we could, driving to the Love’s just down the street. I went in and found the ice cream cooler, buying Elizabeth cookie dough and myself one of the Tollhouse ice cream sandwiches. We took them back to the room, settled with Scipio on the bed, and I reflected that things really could have been worse. Me, my awesome fiancee, and our spaz of a dog were going to a national park the next day. And my ice cream sandwich wasn’t that bad either.
