White Sands

We drove South again, passing the Pedernal (one of Georgia O'Keefe's favourite hills) and stopping for gas at the cool thirties services at Clines Corners, before arriving at Lincoln, a partial ghost town that was the scene of some of Billy the Kid's more famous exploits.You can still see the bullet hole in the courthouse wall from where the Kid shot a deputy in a daring escape after being captured and tried in Mesilla and transported back to Lincoln to hang. There are some really well-preserved and evocative buildings in the town - and no shortage of helpful volunteers - but there is a slightly 'National Trust' feel to the place too. Afterwards we drove through a pretty dramatic thunderstorm, down out of the hills and into the kind of landscape we'd previously expected to find in New Mexico, as the temperature increased and things became less green and more a desert mixture of sand and scrub. We stopped off at White Sands National Park to circle the loop road and stop off a few times to climb the weird, otherworldly dunes of gypsum in the 96-degree heat. It's a stunning place - and an amazing landscape. Unfortunately we rounded things off in the somewhat less appetizing surroundings of a somewhat dodgy Days Inn in Las Cruces. The service was rude, the surroundings insalubrious and the room, accidentally, was a smoker. Unfortunately it turned out to be our mistake and there was no way the miserable jobsworth overseeing reception was going to cut us any slack with a replacement. The only plus point was the hotel dog - a pugnacious looking Chihuahua-cross called Elvis. Luckily Beck still had the energy to drive us a couple more miles to Mesilla, where we had a nice Mexican blowout in a pleasingly garish restaurant with caged parrots and a warren of tiny rooms and a walk round the buzzing plaza, where live music was playing from the bandstand and there was a really cool South-of-the-Border atmosphere.