Moving Eastward

We have been making our way east and yesterday we set up camp in Santa Rosa, New Mexico to sit out the wind for two days. We are in a cold front now and had snow flurries at Bluewater Lake State Park west of Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tuesday. We drove further east to Santa Rosa Lake State Park yesterday, and this morning it was just below freezing when we got up.
This is historical Route 66 country and the area was the "great out west" while the road was "America's Main street" from the late 1920's to the late 1970's when the interstate freeways were built. At that point the traffic started using the expressways and Route 66 was abandoned by the masses and all of the local businesses started to suffer. Now the towns are in pretty rough shape and many businesses are boarded up and the buildings in various stages of disrepair. The homes, too, look like the economy is bad and a lot of areas appear pretty poor.
Albuquerque was a really nice city with modern suburbs and a thriving downtown area. It looks like a town that would be interesting to explore, but we passed through on our way east without stopping.
The winds have been howling the past three days and it made driving difficult unless we were going with the wind, and luckily we were going with it while on I-40. We encountered a lot of dust storms and when we would stop for the night the camper would be full of sand on the table and countertops. I can't imagine living here when the dust flies like it does in April.
Yesterday we were sitting outside and reading when out of the corner of my eye I caught movement. I told Nancy to get up and Moved her out of the way. Then I pointed at the rattlesnake that was crawling toward us! It was a cutie about four feet long and it crawled over to where we were sitting and curled up next to a pile of rocks. I rolled a couple of rocks toward it to scare it off, but it crawled into the rock pile and wouldn't come out! We got in the truck and drove to the ranger's office to file a snake report. They came with a snare pole and picked up the rattler to re-locate it. I was glad to see it go so that we wouldn't have to worry about getting out of the camper and stepping on it! The ranger told us that it is still a month early to be seeing many snakes and this was the first of the year for him. Lucky us!!
We are staying here today, then moving to Amarillo Texas for the weekend. Weather forecast for Amarillo is in the 70's for the weekend.
Hope everyone is doing well.