June 1, 2025

It is always interesting when traveling to see what kind of churches we find where we can attend Mass. This time we found a Mass that worked great with our need for sleep and recovery as well as our need to get on the road. In Banby, CO we attended Our Lady of the Snow. It was a truly beautiful Ascension Mass, and we felt so fortunate to have found this church.

After Mass and a much-longer-than-anticipated stop for coffee, we hurriedly packed up the camper in record time since we only had 15 minutes before we were supposed to check out. I think it took us more like 20 minutes, but we departed quickly and headed south toward Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This is amazing to think that water on one side goes to the Atlantic and the other side to the Pacific!

AnaClaire, Isaac, and Dominic having a good time with each other. Throwing snowballs was definitely one of their favorite activities!

The kids REALLY wanted to visit White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico. We stopped there in January of 2020 when we were driving back from Arizona. You can see the fun we had at White Sands on my YouTube page: https://youtu.be/cq-v-RlF4M8?si=2icuWlOt2_cU3j03 . They had so much fun there that they really wanted to return and show the park to Charlie, who hadn’t been able to travel to Arizona with us. Anyway, White Sands is much farther south than we are able to travel on this trip, so I had to say no to a visit there.

These sand dunes are sooo much bigger than they look. You can see them for many miles off before you actually arrive at the turnoff to go there.

In exchange, I thought we could go visit the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. They weren’t very far off the path to Santa Fe, so we decided to make it a stop. We found a campground and left the RV there and went to explore the Sand Dunes.

There is a creek that runs through the park that is an important part of the ecosystem and keeping the aquifers supplied. Lots of fun is had splashing in the creek!

I had done some research to make sure we could do some sledding on the dunes like we had at White Sands, but I didn’t realize that we wouldn’t be able to drive within the dunes. If you want to sled on the dunes, you have to hike out through the sand for 2 miles or so. Needless to say, most of us are fairly drained of energy from fighting these colds, so we knew there was no way we would be hiking through loose sand to do some sledding. We admired everything there for an hour or so and then headed back to our campground for dinner and bed.