2017 Come Dance on the Devils Highway Ride (NM/AZ)

Post date: May 16, 2017 12:09:42 PM

Ok Friends,

I’m sure that some of you may have heard that I was considering moving this ride back a week because I could not get ANY rooms in Roswell the first day. It turns out that that is college graduation weekend in Roswell and the entire town is booked up. You don’t know how frustrated this made me as this is something that I should have known months ago. Anyway I frantically started looking at alternative plans and got even more frustrated, which caused me to consider moving this ride to the previous Saturday where I could get plenty of rooms. But this morning after coffee, I had a realization that I just needed to move my route south to highway 82 into Cloudcroft instead of going though Ruidoso to get to Cloudcroft. So instead of staying in Roswell, we are staying in Artesia instead, where we will just bear south at Plains which will be the same distance as Roswell. So here are the details of where we are staying, where I have blocked 9 double bed rooms at each location:

The basic itinerary is:

Sat, 5/27 – Denton to Artesia

Sun, 5/28 – Artesia to Silver City

Mon, 5/29 – Silver City to Alpine, AZ (dance on the Devils Highway) for lunch and back to Silver City

Tue, 5/30 – Silver City to the Gila Cliff Dwellings and on to Almagordo for the evening

https://www.nps.gov/gicl/index.htm

Wed 5/31 – Get up late and spend most of the day at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, when they open at 10:00.  This is one nice Museum where they have one of the original dome theaters which have several showings daily.  When finished, head for Ruidoso for the evening.  We stayed at this motel the last time we went to Ruidoso and this location was very nice.

http://www.nmspacemuseum.org/content.php?id=16

Thu, 6/1 – We will spend a relaxing day in Ruidoso riding up to Lincoln, Ski Apache, etc.

Fri, 6/2 – We are going to ride back to Cloudcroft and spend some time riding to and visiting the Sun Spot Solar observatory and on to Tiberon.  And then we are going to head for Carlsbad for the evening. for the trip finale.  But before getting to Carlsbad, I want to ride toSitting Bull Falls:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/lincoln/recarea/?recid=34238

Sat, 6/3 - This day we are going to ride to Carlsbad National Park and spend most of the day visiting these magnificent set of caverns.  Linda and I visited these caverns back in the early 80s with some friends and these caverns spoiled us for any other cavern we ever visited since.  If you have never been to these caverns, you will not be disappointed.

https://www.nps.gov/cave/index.htm

Sun, 6/4 – get up early and head for home.

So if you were planning on making this ride, call the motels and let them know that you want one of the rooms blocked for Rick Butler.  I blocked 9 double bed rooms, but if you need a single King, just let them know and they will make the change.  And once you finish, go ahead and reply to this post, so we will know who is going.

Gonna be a great trip, where you will get some sight seeing in as a tourist other than just riding.  And there are 3 locations where we are staying 2 nights each.

Rick

And I’m still working on routes which I’ll put out later.