Our journey has taken us north and west of Carlsbad. Along our route we stop in the sleepy town of Roswell, New Mexico. It is fair to say, although not sure the residents would agree, that Roswell is pretty non-descript and driving down the main street there is not a lot going on. The reason for our visit is Roswell’s most famous historic event - the discovery of a supposed alien crashed space craft in 1947. The story goes that a local farmer found the peculiar objects in a field on his property and reported this to the local authorities. Initial reports claimed this to be an alien craft but the government official later changed to story to say it was actually a crashed weather balloon. As time went by a number of the key people involved – including some ex-government officials- changed their stories through affidavits. This led to a great number of people calling “foul” and believing the whole thing was a government cover-up and there was actually an alien space craft.
We park up on the main street and the first thing you notice is that all the shops have an extraterrestrial feel – if not the name then the fixtures in the shops (including alien shop dummies). Even the lamp shades of the street lamps are shaped like alien heads. This is the quintessential exploitation!! And we love it! Our destination on this day is the International UFO Museum, which turns out not to be as grand as the name suggests. The museum is set in a building which resembles an old cinema, although they have broken ground on a brand new building in the town. If the outside strikes you as bizarre then the inside is all the more so, and resembles the interior of a large church. The first exhibits we find ,as one might suspect , are surrounding the 1947 incident in Roswell – presenting newspaper articles, government documents, letters and affidavits. It was actually fascinating reading. In the video display room 
they were showing several different films and we were lucky enough to see a video documentary, which was very tongue in cheek, about the International UFO conference held in Roswell a few years back. It was highly amusing but unfortunately they were not selling it in the store otherwise we would have had it. Other exhibits focused on photographic evidence of UFOs, various statements from US Presidents about their thoughts on extraterrestrial life and a particular favourite of ours was the reconstruction of a film set of one of the films made about Roswell with an alien repost on an operating table. We spent a good 90 minutes here and to our surprise we had a great time.Unfortunately we still had some way to go to our final destination of the day, Santa Fe. We crossed the interior of New Mexico, which you could say is just another desert, but we have grown fond of deserts but this one was not too exiting. As we near Santa Fe the landscape takes a dramatic improvement as the Sangre de Cristo Mountains climb from the desert floor. Their 13,000 foot plus snow covered peaks cut a impressive swath in the New Mexico skyline. Eventually we reach the RV park (for our non-US readers RV stands for Recreational Vehicle and is generally what motor homes are called here), close to the down town area of Santa Fe, as usual we arrive just after the office has closed shop for the night so have to find our pitch ourselves. This RV site is very scabby with some very dilapidated looking motor homes on site with some equally dilapidated owners. We will try to do our “trailer trash” best to fit in here for a few days.
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