Back on the “not irritating my friends with my political views” theme, the vacation is going awesome.<\/p>\n
We explored two of the natural wonders of the world on two consecutive days – Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. Each of them left me with a deep and heartfelt appreciation for the National Park Service, as well as the foresight of the government in protecting those spots. Looked at as a pure capitalist, white sands is nothing more than about 5,000,000 dump trucks full of pre-purified gypsum. It’s like an unemployed pile of raw materials … just laying there<\/em> doing nothing! I’m very glad that, once upon a time, we had a government that was able to see beyond the immediate commercial value of the raw materials. <\/p>\n In other news, the irritating cough is still with me. I think this marks week 3 or 4 of the irritating, “top of the lungs, with occasional mucus,” cough. redmed<\/a> has suggested a TB test, in the spirit of justkidding_nr<\/a><\/p>\n Yesterday saw us wandering around El Paso and Juarez. I had never walked across an international border before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back on the “not irritating my friends with my political views” theme, the vacation is going awesome. We explored two of the natural wonders of the world on two consecutive days – Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands. Each of them left me with a deep and heartfelt appreciation for the National Park Service, as well […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-1872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}