Following up on both Spooky Season and my previous update regarding Warhammer -1313 skirmishes, I decided to paint some sKELTitons. Essentially just old Citadel plastic skeletons with metal Gallic shields. Since every month at the end of the year needs a named theme I've dubbed it No Flesh November. ;)
Aside from doing a little painting, I've been doing a lot of work. But that has also involved some travel which gave me a chance to take up a few side quests including a weekend in southern New Mexico. I started off in Amarillo, TX...
...and made a quick morning stop at the Cadillac Ranch where my painting skills were no match for the intense wind blowing across the field...
...I had planned on having lunch at the Midpoint of Route 66, but the cafe was closed, so I settled on standing in the middle of the road at the Midpoint before heading off to get some work done and then flying to El Paso.
After a day of working there, I popped up to NM Saturday morning, racing around to national and other sites before returning to El Paso for a flight home. In the course of my continuing Adventures I...
...visited the "world's largest pistachio" at a tourist stop near Alamogordo, and bought a bag of piscahios to help sustain me through the next two days 😁...
...stood on a 5,000 year old lava flow at Malpais Valley of Fires...
...viewed petroglyphs, some dating back 1,600 years ago, on the Three Rivers Petroglyph Trail...
...returned to gypsum/selenite desert at White Sands. Unfortunately the back country camp sites are closed. My plan was to sleep on the dunes and see the Milky Way, but it was also very cloudy as well. So I hiked part of the Alkali Flat Trail until the sun started to set, got a hotel room and set off again the next morning...
...and the morning drive took me through Lincoln National Forest in the Sacramento Mountains. There were actual trees in the forest a little further in. And snow! Eventually the land leveled out to the high plains before I arrived at...
...Carlsbad Caverns where I spent a few hours below ground and my image/understanding of "caves" will never be the same...
...on my way back to TX, I briefly stopped at the Guadeloupe Mountains visitor center. I walked the first few hundred feet of the nearby trail just to say I hiked in one more park over the weekend 😉 , but I didn't have the time or preparations to actually hike the mountain! Maybe a return trip someday?
The week prior to my Southwest Adventure I had another, shorter trip to the center of the US. Literally.
...but first a stop at the World's Largest Ball of Twine in Cawker City, KC. Exciting as that was, the road was calling...
...and it brought me to the geographic center of the contiguous US.
Pretty busy November and I'm grateful that I got to see some interesting sites along the way! Now I will try to return to more direct miniatures & gaming content, and catch up on some Five Parsecs campaign reports. But I have a feeling that my Adventures will influence the miniatures & gaming. I'm already planning a Grav-Attack Ranch terrain project, and have been thinking a lot about caverns, deserts, petroglyphs. I wouldn't be surprised if more new terrain pops up on this blog in the next few months.
One last item, I've updated the format of the blog to allow larger photos to be displayed. This is a bit overdue, as the blog was originally designed for older display resolution. I guess I've been at this for a while! There's still some issues to work out, but that's for another day.
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