Tripometer – 13,230 mi
Gas Gauge – 1002.257 gal
Location – Rock Hound State Park, Deming, NM
Lodging – $14
Cans of OFF – 4
Election Day
Our number one priority for today was to send off our absentee ballots for the mid-term elections. We had submitted our requests for and received our electronic ballots a couple of weeks ago but had procrastinated printing out the ballot files due to sheer laziness. At lunchtime today we ran into Deming to the library to print the forms and then to the post office to mail them with today’s date. On the way to the post office we passed the office of the Republican Party of Luna County. Neither of us could figure out why a skeleton wearing a republican party t-shirt felt like the right decoration for them to use on election day. We had hoped this might be a premonition of the election outcome.
As soon as Kelly could tear herself away from work this afternoon we ran up the mountain for one last shot at Thunder Eggs. When we went searching for rocks on Tuesday we were so taken by the beautiful agates that we almost ignored the possibility of finding thunder eggs. Today we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what to look for and which specimens to keep. This entailed a good bit of smashing rocks with the hammer and against one another to determine what types of rock might contain crystal pockets and which don’t. The odd part of this activity is that we were actually spending our time smashing rocks together looking for essentially what amounts to glass. Not a safe nor very productive activity. Paul, as designated rock cracker, was always fairly diligent about wearing his reading glasses while smashing rocks together, but at one point near dusk a shard of crystal material broke off of a smaller rock and sliced his hand open enough to embed itself in his palm. After seeing what was possible and judging his Walmart reading glasses to be insufficient protection from THAT, we retired with the samples of rock that we think might have larger pockets of crystals. It’s frustrating to bring home rock samples with no idea of what lays inside. We had discussed taking the possible thunder egg samples to the delapidary down the hill but decided that was a good way to get waylaid talking to the old fellow for the rest of the evening. We will likely purchase the equipment necessary to cut these specimens open when we get home. For now we’re saddled with carrying 20 pounds of potentially useless rock around with us until we get home.
We’ve included a picture of our top 5 potential thunder eggs above. The eggs are formed by gas bubbles in lava and each of these samples displays signs of bubbles on the surface but we really have no idea if our observations mean anything until we get them open using something other than a rock hammer.
The second we returned to the trailer tonight we turned on CNN’s election coverage and set up for a night of watching the election results roll in. Dinner of pork and beans was all we had patience for preparing this evening. Wolfe Blitzer had our rapt attention until long after our bed times.