We once again got up early and went to White Sands National Monument. White Sands is made of gypsum, not quartz, making it white, fine, and very soft. The gypsum literally comes from dissolved residue of mountains. The dunes are held together by sand that's underneath it, gluing them together so they don't blow away in the high winds. (My dad and I decided to test how hydrophilic this gypsum was, so we spat on the top of a dune - to our surprise, it semi-solidified, forming grainy but sort of gelatinous blobs. We decided against a spitball contest.) The dunes, for all their uninhabitability (yes, plants live out there), harbor more life than I would have remotely expected. Pretty purple flowers grow out of the dunes, as well as tufts of grass. Some plants build themselves into the sand and, as the sand blows away, it leaves a pedestal - basically a stump made of hardened sand. The sand overtook the road, and all you could see was white sand and blue sky.

In the visitor's center, we continued our trip theme of people letting things open so we can walk around and buy about six dollars' worth of goods. The shop was interesting to walk around - New Mexico continued its trend of being more ecologically-minded and progressive by exhibiting goods such as CD cases and photo albums made from two sides of an old license plate. We got a christmas tree ornament for my mom's collection - a large red chili pepper. (For a place that has little water, these people sure like their spicy foods.)

Of course, one cannot go to White Sands and not bring a sled. We borrowed three disk-shaped sleds from the Alamogordo hotel, disks left over from people who didn't want them anymore and didn't sell them back to White Sands for some cash back. I waxed these sleds in the hotel room, noticing a fine, fine layer of sand on them, a harbinger of what we were to see. We sledded down a steep dune, at an altitude nearly a mile high above sea level. Is was fun, but we got winded fast. We were out there for about an hour in all, taking turns trudging up thin, sliding sands at about a 55 degree incline for a few seconds of fun zipping down it in the groove that we made. My mom, on her few turns, got the most distance out of all of us, screaming as if she was being pursued by a swarm of bees brandishing knives, after which she hit a patch of vegetation and got slightly airborne, smacking down on the ground. When I hit it, I tumbled over, rolling over once on the hardened sand. It kind of hurt. (Though it's soft on the sides of the dunes, the top is solid - almost hard to walk on, even with the modicum of padding that our socks provided us. [We were told at the hotel by a dune-sliding veteran that tennis shoes would hold about five pounds of sand, and lacking the sandals that she suggested, decided to go sock-only.]) On the way back, we saw a very cute mouse. It darted in and out of its hole in random patterns - going out, munching a twig, reversing back in, going out, in, farther in, back up, etc. We also saw a completely white lizard, adapted to its environment of pure white. In fact, I didn't see anything until I really looked hard - and even then, it looked barely more than a lizard-shaped outline in the sand. There was also a smaller hole which we thought was a snake, but we got out of there before we could find out.

White Sands also reflects the sun so much that it's cool to the touch - in fact, cold to the touch in some parts. I'm used to sand being hot if baked in sun, but White Sands just reflected everything. It's also vast - 275 total square miles of endless dune, 115 within the Monument itself. (The rest is missile range.) There's so much there for sledding perusal that it could be in the middle of the tourist season and it would look as deserted as it did when we were out there - before the crowds, as is our modus operandi this trip.

We went back to the room and cleaned up because the sand is so very, indescribably fine - there is still some stuck in the larger grooves of the brake pedal. It just gets everywhere - and showering it off was rather unpleasant, because it had decided to use the thin layer of sunscreen that still existed on my forearm as an adhesive, and even made the water a little thicker as I washed it off.

We took a deviation to a town called White Oak - a town advertised as a ghost town but still has about 50 people. There was a gold mine near the area but after World War II the town became essentially how it is today. There's a house with Victorian architecture, among other interesting buildings in the region.

After White Oak, we saw another strange state park - the Valley of Fires, which, though hot, had no fire. It did, however, go through just but a small portion of a large dried lava field that erumpently erupted 4000 years ago. The rock is dry, cracked, and pitch-black. A lizard with strange coloration darted in front of us on the trail, and the cacti flowers feel like plastic. They use Hawaiian names to denote the various types of lava. You could see it for miles just like White Sands, and I got a couple of panorama shots.

Heading up and down various mountain ranges coming up from the Valley of Fires, I spotted a fox similar to the one that apparently has a vacation home in our backyard, though this fox was slightly bigger and tan colored. I also spotted a huge dust devil that must have been about 25 miles out. It was huge - at first, I thought that it was a tornado, but then saw that it petered out into what - as the dust devil lost steam - could easily be mistaken for a cloud. The mountain range in the far background two mountain ranges - the Magdalena range shorter and closer in, and the larger San Mateo mountains out in the distance, easily 40 miles out. The latter range reaches to 10,000 feet regularly.

We got into Albuquerque and, having only had about five small Nutter Butters, two small glasses of apple juice, and two large bottles of water to drink for the entire day, decided that we needed a big meal. Of course, Albuquerque has a number of Guy Fieri places - but my dad had his eyes on a place called the Standard Diner ever since our stay in Amarillo. While the name makes it sound decidedly mundane, everything from its façade to the unique mix of futuristic retro in the interior was unique. It served tons of classic diner fare, but they all had twists to them. Everything on the menu looked delicious to an absurd and maybe borderline illegal degree, but I eventually had the Chicken-Fried Steak, while my mom and dad both got the Finer Loaf - a meat loaf with bacon in it. (There was a mix-up here - my mom was going to order the Mac and Cheese with Bacon, but there was a confusing exchange and they ended up getting two Finer Loafs and the Mac and Cheese on the side. Oh well. It was good anyway.) The dessert was also delicious - not too sweet, but light enough to finish a meal off. We got the small sizes, which were alike in the fact that they were all served up in square, oversized shot glasses. (Dad was so infatuated with the place that he wants to go back for a burger tomorrow for lunch.)

Having nothing else to do in Albuquerque, and seeing that, finally, there was a minor league game in town, we went over to see the Albuquerque Isotopes take on the Fresno Grizzlies. The catcher for the Grizzlies, one Eli Whiteside, caught Jonathan Sanchez's no-hitter for the Giants a few years ago. The first Isotopes batter hit a home run over the right-field fence. The starting pitcher for the Isotopes took a no-hitter into the fifth inning, but the reliever blew their lead in the sixth, making the game tied 6-6. As we were about to leave in the top of the seventh, in order to get to the hotel in time, the Isotopes took the lead again. (The Isotopes won the game, 8-7.) Some guy way up in our section tried to get the wave going a couple of times, moderately succeeding occasionally. Most times, though, the fans seemed too lackadaisical to care.

The roads of Albuquerque, I have decided, have all the undesirable qualities present in Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Lubbock. Wind, darkness, strange road systems that our GPS didn't know, and lanes that ran out without much prior warning. (At least they gave you some warning.) The GPS then wanted to, absurdly, send us in circles in a residential area, which the hotel person told us was completely normal. Eventually, we decided to ignore it and within minutes found our hotel. Our room is the finest hotel room we've been in since we got a large suite in Pittsburgh as a reparation for our having to sleep in a mock room.

Tomorrow: Flagstaff, AZ.