Awesome thunderstorm and on to Alamogordo

August 6th

When in Liberal we looked up a campground in Guymon OK, which was about 30 miles to the southwest.  As we left Liberal we knew we were in for an interesting time as there was a nasty looking thunderstorm flashing and banging in the southwest. So we headed towards Guymon with one eye on the sky and the other on the road.  We stopped for gas about 20 miles out and I asked a local what he thought and he said we had a fifty-fifty shot on making it.  So off we went as fast as we felt comfortable going.  I'm sure the truckers were getting a kick out of us as it was clear what we were trying to do.  As we were flying towards town the storm got blacker and blacker with more lighting then I've ever seen in a storm before.  About five miles from town big droplets started pelting us, and we saw an abandoned warehouse not far off the road so we beat it into that just as the winds really started to pick up.  As it was pouring down rain we decided to forget going to the campground and just set our hammocks up in the shed as the poles were just the right distance apart.  So we got to listen to the pounding rain roaring on the tin roof as we attempted to sleep. We were up and out on the road at daybreak.  After the short ride through Oklahoma we had a short shot through Texas before reaching New Mexico.  We ran route 54 down to where we hit interstate 40 which would have taken us to Albuquerque but we didn't feel like buzzing along on the boring highway so we picked a route out that would bypass 40 and join up with our intended route farther south.  I am really glad we did that because we got to see a lot of the county side which was mostly just desert (it felt like the desert to, intense heat!).  We ended up coming across route 82 which took us up to 8,200 ft in elevation before dropping back down into Alamogordo NM at 4000 something feet in elevation. The neat thing about that was that coming across the dessert it was well over 100 degrees and as we climbed the mountain it kept getting cooler and cooler till it was actually cold at the top (it was drizzling and cloudy so that didn't help).  Then coming down the other side the sun burst out again and it was back to 100 degrees down in the desert town of Alamogordo.  That ride through the mountains got use excited to get started on the CDT.  We changed our oil in Alamogordo and found a real campground for the first time this trip just south of the city.