I've had a difficult time deciding what route to take through New Mexico. On one hand, I wanted to head south to check out Carlsbad Caverns and steer clear of the mountains (and the cold) as much as possible. On the other hand, many people I've spoken with out here, including the two county sheriffs I met in Texas who hear all the police reports, have strongly urged me to stay as far away from the Mexican border as possible due to the rampant drug- and immigration-related crime there, much of which is targeted at young, single women. So my choices essentially boiled down to beautiful natural caverns, desert, and high crime, or touristy alien schlock, mountains, and bone-chilling cold. I chose the latter by heading for Roswell.

I felt affirmed in my decision by some of the stories my campground neighbor Mike, a rugged-looking guy with a cowboy hat, camouflage jacket, and ice-blue eyes, shared with me over coffee. He had a business fail two years ago, at which point he sold everything, took the settlement money, and started traveling all over the country in his van. At one point he was traveling with a friend, and they woke up in the night to find four guys with a green truck attempting to break into his friend's RV. The next day they saw the same green truck being pulled over for speeding, so they stopped and mentioned to the cops what had happened. At that point the police searched the truck and found it loaded with drugs. Mike advised me to not camp on the side of the road anymore for the rest of the trip, which I shouldn't need to do any more now that I'm out of Texas, and towns and state parks abound. As for the desert? Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Anyway, I had a good time hearing about Mike's travels and seeing samples from his collection of metals and stones he's found. When he embarked on his journey, he made a list of things he wanted to do, and one of the items was to pan for gold. He found gold flakes and a meteorite on his first try, and was immediately hooked. Nowadays most of his excursions seem to involve panning for gold or hunting for other precious and semi-precious, or at least very sparkly, stones, which include diamonds, opals, rubies, geodes, and big chunk of a very rare green-dotted specimen called California jadite.

Mike's about to head back East (he too is from upstate New York, Buffalo to be exact) for some much-needed "couch time" (I can relate). On his next trip he wants to visit the Arkansas diamond mines, so I suggested he visit Hot Springs too and shared a few stories from there and other interesting spots I've visited. "Wow, traveling the country by bike. That requires a lot of. . ." Here he paused, and I sensed he was hunting for another word besides "balls" in order to not offend my delicate ladylike sensibilities. "Fortitude, and courage," he concluded. I was honored when he broke off a piece of California jadeite for me as I was headed out.

I had ridden past the so-called bottomless lakes the evening before, but didn't fully appreciate them until I stopped in at the Visitor's Center and learned more about them. They are cenotes, or sinkhole lakes, formed when layers of gypsum between layers of siltstone are eroded by groundwater, until eventually the siltstone caves in and the resulting hole is filled with water. The lakes are small, very deep, and fed by groundwater rather than by springs flowing in and out. The most striking thing about them is the wide, snowy white gypsum salt "beaches" that are left when the mineral-rich water evaporates. I did attempt to swim in one of the lakes, but was thwarted by the cold water and the mud that sucked me in up to my knees like quicksand when I took a step in. So I opted to lie on the gypsum for a while, read a book, and soak up some sun, which felt particularly nice after another cold night.

But I couldn't stay long. I forgot to mention that a raccoon completely cleaned me out of food in the night. The pannier containing my food was clipped shut and everything, but he deftly reached under the top flap and pulled out all the ziploc bags containing  trail mix, a bag of raisins, a whole bunch of instant oatmeal, crackers, cheese, and two apples. The sad part is that I heard all this racket at 4:00AM, but had blamed my other campground neighbors, a not particularly quiet family of four. I lay there drowsily and angrily thinking that if Dad got hungry in the middle of the night, the least he could do was keep the rustling of plastic bags to a minimum and chew with his mouth closed. The raccoon kindly spared me 2 packets of oatmeal for breakfast (how thoughtful!) but since I had nothing else to eat I figured I'd better get into town sooner rather than later.

I planned to stay in Roswell for the whole day and give myself a day off to visit the UFO Museum. It occurred to me along the 20-mile bike ride into town how interesting it is that I now consider a 20 mile bike ride "a day off," when only 4 months ago it would have been an epic workout deserving of much self-congratulation. Once I got off the hilly roads coming from the state park, in which I was riding directly into the northerly wind, I had an easy ride the rest of the way. My progress was helped along by the biggest hill I've coasted down in a very long time.

Once in town, I stopped at the Visitor Center (whose logo features a flying saucer and the tagline "Visitors Welcome") to figure out where I might spend the night. A lady named Emily greeted me, rattled off about a dozen awesome-sounding things to do in and around Roswell, which was about 11 more things than I'd actually have time for, and loaded me up with brochures, maps, and a coupon for a discounted rate on the cheapest motel in town. We chatted for a bit and he said she found my trip very inspiring, that she would have liked to do something like this but now has kids. She also mentioned, very casually and even cheerfully, that she just found out two weeks ago she has cancer. Thankfully, they found it early enough to treat. She sounded like she was in remarkably good spirits about it, as if there were absolutely zero chance of not recovering completely. I truly think that's half the battle.

I wished Emily well and headed out to find lunch (I was on the verge of keeling over from lack of food by that point) followed by a trip to the UFO Museum. It was one of the oddest museums I've ever been to. It reminded me of an overeager high school student's class project: very low budget, and very thorough. One whole side of the museum consisted of cheap pegboard walls onto which were tacked all sorts of documents even tangentially related to the 1947 "Roswell Incident": newspaper clippings, interview transcripts, signed affadavits by eyewitnesses or relatives or friends of eyewitnesses, exhaustive military reports, and so on.

To simplify, the story they tell is that a rancher named Mac Brazel and several other witnesses heard a crash and an accompanying flash of light, and the next day Brazel's son found debris. Another guy claimed to have driven out there and seen alien bodies in the wreckage. The local sheriff put in a call to the Air Force, who held Brazel for 5 days, after which he changed his story to support that Air Force's claim that the wreckage was a weather balloon, and the alien bodies were crash test dummies. Brazel suddenly seemed to have lots of money and moved away shortly thereafter. Glenn Dennis, the founder of the museum, was a mortician who routinely handled military contracts. The Air Force called a few days after the incident and asked if he could get hypothetically get a few hermetically sealed 3-4 foot long coffins, and on a routine visit to the Air Force hospital was warned by a distraught nurse he knew to get out of there lest he get into serious trouble. The nurse later told him that she'd seen the alien bodies being autopsied.

Whatever did or didn't happen at Roswell makes for a great book (of which there are several) but a pretty lousy museum. By the very nature of the story there is just nothing to see, aside from piles of dry of documents, rounded out by artists' renditions of alien life forms, blurry flying saucer photos, and cheesy mannequins. They even had a small glass case featuring found objects in nature (rocks, shells, and the like) that resemble flying saucers or aliens, which could not be less relevant.

But all in all, I'm glad I came through Roswell. I do enjoy a good dose of tourist schlock every now and again, a component which, until now, has been sorely lacking on this trip. And who doesn't love a nice sinkhole lake?