Dormancy

I wrote the following paragraphs back at the beginning of January and then never posted this. I'll get into that a bit more in my next post. For now, here are a couple of photographs from the wintry weather in Las Cruces, and some thoughts about why I stayed there so long:

I have had various reasons for sticking around Las Cruces the last few days. First there was the snow storm, then there was my desire to rest, then it was New Year's Eve and I didn't want to be out on the roads in any significant way that day. I had a plan to leave New Year's Day, and then I found out that a friend who I was planning to meet in Arizona had gotten fed up with camping in freezing weather and was heading East. If I wanted to see him, I needed to stay put in Las Cruces a bit longer and he would come through. Then there was more snow predicted on January 2, and I devised a plan to leave on January 3. That would make me late for the gathering I wanted to attend near Quartzsite, but if I stopped long enough to be honest with myself, I would notice that I was getting less and less excited about that gathering.

The cold weather in Arizona persisted, increasing my tendency to stay put and hibernate. When I finally did head West again, I had the rare treat of driving through stretches of desert lightly dusted with snow and ice. Unfortunately I didn't get any photographs away from civilization, and my only images of the snow are of the landscaping at my motel. The fog in this  hoto was really beautiful, but the only place I found to stop and get a photo was a big parking lot.