After a fun morning in Roswell, New Mexico we were back on the highway heading southwest towards Deming. What’s in Deming you ask? Not a whole lot, but we needed a place to crash before making the trek to Tucson where there’d be plenty. Today’s stretch was about three hours and if there’s one thing we’ve learned from previous road trips, it’s the importance of breaking up long drives with any interesting attractions we can find along the way. Unfortunately, those aren’t easy to come by in this mountainous region which is why we were very happy to discover something just an hour into the drive while also gaining new insights about America’s iconic messenger of forest fire prevention, Smokey Bear. Now for most of my life I’ve always referred to him as Smokey THE Bear but, after being admonished on numerous occasions by our friend April (whose father-in-law used to be the Director of New Hampshire’s Forest and Land), have since learned the error of my ways and no longer use the word “the” as Smokey’s middle name.

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