Other Sights in the Rodeo NM Area

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After our monster hike, we were not really looking to do much walking the next day. Just a few miles south of the campgrounds is the Chiricahua Desert Museum. The place isn't too big so we knew there wasn't going to be a whole lot of walking required. Admission into the museum was just $10 for the two of us. There are just two rooms to go thru but they are full of terrariums with all manner of poisonous snakes, lizards and spiders.

Museum Sign

It was fascinating to check these out. Some of the smaller animals created a sort of Where's Waldo game. there were more than a few that obviously had great hiding spots since we never saw them. All the terrariums had some sort of picture and info about what was inside. I didn't do a good job of keeping track, so don't ask me what anything is.

At one point the woman that is in charge of the animals came out to check up on something. We got to talking with her and she told us a little bit about the place. We asked her if it costs more to actually see them get fed but she told us they typically don't like to feed them when customers are around since the snakes get nervous when they see people moving about while they have their mouths full.

Hiding in Small Tube

Kind of Cute?

She went to the back and came out with a jar of crickets. Whereupon she opened a cage that had some sort of lizard and dropped half a dozen crickets inside. Since nothing happened, she lifted the small water bowl to reveal its hiding location. Either it wasn't hungry or was pissed she had interrupted its nap, but we never saw it eat a cricket.

Looking Slick

A couple minutes later she came out with two small salamanders or lizards and opened the front door of one of the cages that had two very long and slender snakes. The food was bigger in diameter than the snakes are. One of the snakes, eyed its meal and slowly moved in. I expected the salamander to try to hide somewhere but it almost looked to be hypnotized by the snake. In one quick strike, the meal was caught. It waited about 10 minutes before it sensed the thing was dead and then it started to swallow it. By this time a few other visitors had showed up and we waved the two kids over to this cage to see the snake eat.

Look Closely, Snake on Right Has Salamander

Salamander is Several Inches Back in Snake

We actually saw a few days of rain while we were here. Is sounds like they generally have pretty dry weather this time of year. Oh well it just means we get to rest our legs a little more. We go out in between showers and do a very short walk just to get a geocache. Plus this puts us near the one grocery store with 30 miles of camp. We needed milk before now but the store wasn't open until today. I usually let Chris run in when we only need an item or two, but I wanted to see the store since the building looked rather small. Well it turned out the store is actually just one room in the building with a small diner on the other part. To say the selection was small is an understatement. I suspect we have more food in our rig than the store has. but they did have milk that wasn't expired. $6.99 seemed steep for a gallon but it beats the cost of driving 50 miles to another store.

As we were driving back to camp, we finally saw the elusive  javelina - actually a whole family of them as they ran across the road a hundred feet in front of us. Supposedly these things are very common in the southern areas we are at. In fact, we first heard about them over 3 weeks ago when we got to Davis Mountain State Park. Supposedly they travel in small packs and were all over the place but even with all of our hiking we have been doing, we never had seen any. I will add a photo from elsewhere so you know what they look like.

Javelina

The small town of Animas New Mexico is about 12 miles or so east of our camp. We decided to go over and check it out as well as get the handful of caches scattered around town. Lets just say it is a very small town but it did have a school and a reasonably sized one at that. Almost wonder if it is the school for the whole county since  there definitely not enough kids living locally to fill the classrooms.

One thing we have noticed in much of our travels around these southern states are the numerous Border Patrol trucks. They seem to be parked along the side of the rode just about everywhere. It wasn't clear what they were supposed to be doing. Were they watching all passing vehicles looking for suspicious passengers? Or are they just scattered about in case some report comes in about some illegals coming across the Mexican border. They never gave us any trouble even though we passed the same one a couple times in a short time while we were heading for geocaches.

Speaking of geocaching, ever since leaving the San Antonio area, we have been in some desolate places which also means the number of available caches has dropped dramatically. We have managed to find at least one cache a day for the last 170'ish days. But we have really needed to do some careful planning and I suppose you could call it cache rationing in order to keep the streak going. Chris thinks I'm crazy for even worrying about this but at least she is willing to entertain me in regards to it. What can I say, I'm a sucker for numbers.

One good thing about having some rainy days, it allows us to get some chores done around the "house". I had washed the outside of the rig just the other week while in Deming NM, but we hadn't done a real thorough cleaning inside in some time. Surprisingly, I spent the better part of a day to clean all the wood - doors, drawers, paneling and moldings - but only managed to get the "living room", "dining room", "kitchen", and bathroom done. I guess the bedroom will have to wait. I don't know the exact size of our place but it is likely on the order of 300 to 350 square feet so pretty small but it still can take some time to do our spring cleaning.  I will say the woodwork probably hasn't looked this good since the day the coach was completed.

Our Rig Is In the Rear of the Other One

Nice Rainbow