Muleshoe Texas, Grulla National Wildlife Refuge and a Visit to Portales New Mexico…

Wow I am still reflecting about how breathtaking Caprock Canyons State Park was! We would certainly love to visit this park again hopefully when it is cooler so we can hike some of the longer loop trails. Next up for us is a weekend stop in Muleshoe, Texas. I found a city owned park which is first come first served so we are hoping to get a site there. You would think we shouldn’t be worried but this park has full hookups and is free for up to three nights. Yes, it is FREE!

Luckily when we arrived we found one last open site so we pulled into the pull though spot. Full hookups were nice since we had not had a sewer hookup since we left Blanco Texas. We will only stay two nights and then move on. There is a donation box for those who stay as the park says electricity is their largest expense.

We decided since we are staying for free we would stimulate the economy by going out for lunch. We stopped in at Taqueria Guadalajara which was pretty darned tasty and then further stimulated the economy by shopping for some groceries at the United Grocery store in town.

There isn’t a lot to do in this area but Sharon and I headed over to Grulla National Wildlife Refuge to hike on some of their hiking trails. Temperatures were much milder this day as the high was only expected to barely reach 90.

The refuge is part of High Plains right on the border of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. It consists of 3,236 acres and the feature here is a shallow saline lake known as Salt Lake where sandhill cranes and migratory waterfowl stop over on their migratory routes. There were a a record peak of 100,000 cranes documented in 2005. The refuge is also home to lesser prairie chickens which unfortunately we did not see.

We sure enjoyed the hike down to near Salt Lake. It was windy this day and the mostly dry The saline lake looked eerie as plumes of sand filled the sky hovering over the lake bed. Though it was not an overly scenic site we enjoyed the scenery as“other worldly” and we were glad we included in our day’s plan.

Our last stop was in downtown Portales, a sleepy university town. Located here is Eastern New Mexico State University, home of the Greyhounds. It is the third largest university in the state of New Mexico. While we checked out the campus our main reason to come to Portales was for happy hour at the Roosevelt Brewing Company where we enjoyed some above average craft beers at really nice prices.It was $3 per pint at happy hour and growler fills were only $10 so we had them fill our growler to take home with us.

It was another great day during our stay at a quiet little town in the panhandle of Texas. Before we left Muleshoe and the great state of Texas we just had to stop one more time at Taqueria Guadalajara this time for breakfast. Their huevos rancheros were an excellent send off as we leave Texas to enter into New Mexico and change over to Mountain Time.

NOTE: We left Muleshoe Texas and spent two nights at Sumner Lake State Park in New Mexico and are now in Albuquerque NM for a week…