Alright, tonight I (Dennis) will be posting, so expect a change from Grandpa's posts.

We started out at Brantley Lake State Park, and travelled west over the Sacramento Mountains. I drove most of the way (slowly!) and had the "fun" experience of driving ten miles down a 6% grade that had been advertised fifty miles away for trucks to stay away from.  If you were behind me coming down, sorry for hitting the brakes, slowing down to ten miles an hour under the speed limit, then coasting to five miles an hour above the speed limit, then slowing down again, then speeding back up again, then repeating a hundred more times.  He told me to do it! :) Anyway, after finding a scenic overlook that we could stop at right after a short tunnel, Grandpa started driving again, then five miles later we were back on flat ground.

After getting set up at the family camp at Holloman Air Force Base, we headed to the New Mexico Space Museum. It was pretty interesting, and they had a lot of rockets standing up out front that had been tested at the nearby White Sands missile testing range. We saw an IMAX movie about the last repair to the Hubble Space Telescope, which was really neat. The IMAX theater had a much wider field of view than a computer, television, or movie screen, and that made it look more like you were really there. After that, we went through the museum, and learned a lot about spaceflight. This museum is also home to the International Space Hall of Fame, and we learned a lot about important people in space history.

We couldn't see all of the exhibits, since we got there only a couple of hours before closing time, so after seeing as much as we could, we headed back to the base. We cruised around for a while trying to see the F-22 Raptor stealth fighters based here, but they're pretty stealthy on the ground too. We instead settled on going to a park where they had parked one of every major kind of plane that had been based at this base, including an F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber. After that, we went and got dinner, got back to the motorhome, I called home (Happy Mother's Day, Mom!), and started to type this. Now I'm done with it, do I'll let Grandpa type whatever he wants.
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What more could I say?

Tomorrow we plan to visit White Sands NM, then move on to Las Cruces to visit Had Kading.

The GMC's been doing great!  Dennis didn't mention that his drive included climbing from 3310' at Carlsbad to 8650' at Cloudcroft, probably because the Cad500 pulled it so easily we hardly noticed.  It was just over 2000 miles ago that I changed the oil -- and have added none since!  MUCH better than any engine I've had in here before.  We still don't talk about gas mileage.

-Dennis
& Ken