Category: Travel
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The Tularosa Basin, Bosque del Apache
The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is famous as a wintering spot for sandhill cranes and snow geese. The refuge consists of a series of large diked ponds adjacent to the Rio Grande, flooded and drained as needed to maintain wildlife habitat. The managed flooding is intended to emulate the natural flooding of the…
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There is something about lava…
We’re back down in New Mexico, spending the night overlooking the lava field in the Valley of Fire National Recreation Area. We didn’t plan to going here – it just happened to be a cheap place to camp close to where we wanted to stop for the night. Seems like we stumbled on to a…
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Travel & Technology – Hits & Misses
I thought it would be useful to enumerate some of the things that worked well and didn’t work well during this last trip. Here’s the first ‘hit and miss’ list. Technology hits: Data plans: We have two ATT phones on a cheap 4GB shared data plan with about 3GB rollover and a Verizon 8800L MiFi…
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Red Flag Days & Home
Because we wanted a few days to clean up and winterize the campervan before it got too cold in Minnesota, we decided to head for home. Our route took us northeast across Kansas & north through Missouri and Iowa. Unfortunately we picked some awfully windy days. We hit a three days of crosswinds (15-30 mph…
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Shortgrass Prairie, No Man’s Land
Northeast New Mexico is a vast area of shortgrass prairie. Towns are small and far apart. It’s sparsely populated, with cattle ranching the only obvious activity. The roads seem endless, grassland to the horizon. Moving east, we drove through the mixed rangeland and cropland of the western edge of ‘No Man’s Land’, the western Oklahoma…
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Lava Flows and Dinosaur Tracks
One of the ways I prep for trips is to use My Places in Google maps to keep lists of things we might want to see someday. Somewhere along the line I marked El Malpais National Monument. I don’t remember why – I only know that sometime in the last few years I thought it…
Michael Janke 