GONE WITH THE WIND...

I've referred to the winds in several previous posts, so now I will tell you a little about "the winds".

Between the months of March and June is when they hit the western area of New Mexico. Not quite gale force, but enough to make you want to hunker down and say a few prayers at times. They are constant, through the day and evening, between 30 and 40 miles per hour...slowing to 20 mph, which could be consider a break in the wind.

Our first experience with the winds was over Memorial weekend in '06. Let's just say there was no point in attempting to light the candles on Karen's birthday cake that year!

We hunkered down in our lawn chairs, under some trees for protection from the winds. After a couple hours of this non-stop thrashing, we decided to just sit in the truck which proved to be much better protection from this assault. We didn't have our travel trailer at the ranch yet, and had just planned to sleep in a tent.

Throughout the day it became clear that we wouldn't get a wink of sleep with the way the sides of the tent were billowing in and out in the wind. Scritch, scritch, whoosh, scritch, scritch, whoooooosh....

We slept in the truck that night, and headed back to AZ the next day.

After getting the travel trailer up on the land later that summer, the wind was much more tolerable with a hard-walled place to take shelter. Late one evening in the summer of '08, we were sitting in the trailer playing cards....

The winds came...and fortunately we had already taken our awning in, (unlike our neighbors who saw their awning go sailing across their meadow, probably that same evening)

Cue the intergalactic starwars fighter sound effects going on all around us, zing...ping....whoosh...zing...zoom...zoom...zing...

The little trailer was rocking and rolling and creaking like we didn't think possible. And it wouldn't stop. It didn't stop...for hours.

We tried to remain calm...continued playing cards.... me thinking that perhaps we should look into getting hurricane tie-downs or something for this little metal box we were hoping would keep us safe from the elements...namely the wind.

During March through June (we had been told it had been just through the begininng of May) we know to button up the long coat, and draw the stampede strap tight on the cowboy hat, and hope we don't get carried off across the meadow if we need to step outside for some reason.

Because with the winds we've experienced in the past 3 years, we wouldn't be surprised to see a cow go sailing by.