Stop 5: Santa Rosa, NM

We had quite a bit of rain last night and were surprised to see a dusting of snow on the surrounding hills this morning. Santa Rosa also has some snow on the hills to the North.

The weather front that we were fighting yesterday moved on out and the little bit of wind that we encountered was pushing us from behind. The number of miles covered today was exactly the same as yesterday but or gasoline mileage jumped from 10.5 MPG yesterday to 14.5 MPG today. Quite an improvement, I'd say. As I'm typing this the wind just increased to a howl - that's why we generally travel in the mornings.

On the way here, we kept seeing signs about Santa Rosa's amazing Blue Hole. Since my Mom has mentioned the Blue Hole a number of times over the years, we thought that we'd make an effort to see it. Turns out that it didn't require much effort. We expected to have to drive miles out into the country. To our surprise, we found it in town, about 1/2 mile away on the other side of the freeway.

I'd had the idea that the Blue Hole was one of those "so deep it's never been measured" phenomenons. It's been measured and it's 81 feet deep. It has a constant 3000 gallons flowing out of it (and I'd assume into it somewhere in it's depths). They encourage people to swim in the Blue Hole. 61° doesn't sound that warm to me - it never varies from 61°. Maybe it feels really good on a very hot day.

-JC-