Day eighteen -- Sonora to San Antonio, Texas

Not much to report today since we had to do Interstate 10 to get here (San Antonio, Texas) and our usual secondary roads didn't quite do the job since they sort of moved in diagonals away from where we wanted to be. We listened to a bunch of Agatha Cristie stories on the disk player, had a nice lunch along the way in a woody park setting, and generally took it easy until we got to San Antonio proper. Here the Interstate turned into the Mad Hatter's Tea Party of cars plunging here, there, and everywhere and I had to really concentrate on the GPS directions in order to find our way through the maze of freeway choices to arrive here at the KOA in one piece. As some compensation for the lack of news I penned the following piece last night when I had no internet access:

WHAT CONSTITUTES A "GOOD" RV PARK?

Renting a spot in an RV park is always a crap shoot. Sometimes the ground is level, the space between rigs is ample, the utilities are in good working order, there are no barking dogs close by, the WiFi is astoundingly good, you have a nice grill in your camp on which to do your steaks, and the price, once you present your KOA or Good Sam discount card, is in the $25.00 range. Other times, none of these things might turn out to be true.

On the subject of level ground, we’ve found that some camp operators take this very seriously and some do not. Some keep the spaces graded , leveled, and graveled, and some defer the maintenance so long that it begins to look like they don’t care. I like it when they gravel the site so you don’t track mud into your RV. Asphalt is okay, but not my favorite since it’s always hot, harsh, and unfriendly looking. Dirt is the worst, but can be okay if it’s hard-packed or grassy and not soft or muddy.

When it comes to leveling, I carry drive-up ramps which I’ve shown on the blog before. They’re heavy, but they need to be heavy to support the weight of the RV. Though most park owners don’t go too far out of their way to actually level each space, a good set of drive-up ramps can make your life very simple.

On the subject of electrical power, the widest possible range of quality can be encountered. Last night, the electrical panel where I needed to plug in our 30 amp service cord was so loosey goosey that the head of the cord actually fell out of the panel when I wasn’t looking. When I went to pull something out of the fridge, I noticed that the temperature didn’t seem quite right. Dashing back to the panel, I discovered the head of the cord on the ground. I’m not sure whether I might have bumped the cord, but even so it should not have just fallen out. Point of fact, I very seldom see electric utilities that are in good shape. I’ve never had to actually move to a different spot for a better connection, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens someday.

Water connections are almost humorous in their variety. Some parks give you two faucets, though most give you one. Some parks wrap so much “insulation” around their plumbing that you can hardly find the faucet head, while others use the nicer freeze proof models. I like the freeze proof since they’re almost always taller. The dinky short faucets always seem to be dripping, creating a damp or muddy spot around the base. That’s a perfect description of our faucet last night.

And then there’s the sewer connection. Most park owners who know what they’re doing give you a very sturdy pipe with a “flip-top” lid that won’t get lost. But what you see most times is a white plastic pipe that stubs out somewhere close to your rig with an easily-lost, separate cap. Once again, if the park owner knows what they’re doing, the pipe stubs out more or less flush with the ground, or just an inch or two above ground. The less accomplished park owners will cap the pipe off six or more inches above the ground, which makes it very difficult to suspend your sewer pipe in mid-air somehow so the pipe runs downhill from your rig’s sewer outlet. In anticipation of this problem, I carry a couple of lengths of standard white plastic rain gutter material which I can use to hold the hose when the hose has to be too far above the ground for my accordion device to be useful. I just support the gutter pieces with whatever large objects I can lay hands on. Usually the galvanized tub and bucket that I carry does the job.

On the subject of people’s pets, I don’t have much to complain about other than we don’t like unnecessary barking. We’ve only encountered that situation once, I think in Colorado, where there were so many dogs in the park that I thought we had accidently wandered into the film set for animal planet or something. Dogs barked at people, at each other, and at nothing at all as far as I could see. Dogs especially barked at all the folks passing by in their evening stroll around the park. And, of course, when one dog barked, they all barked. I truly thought that we were going to have to move to a different park that night. Still, most times people are pretty good about keeping their pets in check. Usually our only recurrent complaint is that people put their clothes covered in dog or cat hair into the Park washing machines and then don’t bother to clean the machines when they’re done and before the next user arrives. That’s just rude, but it’s all too common I’m afraid.

I’ve already complained enough about the quality of Park WiFi so I won’t belabor the point. At best, WiFi is barely acceptable. At worst, it’s a nightmare. When we tried to attach to the RV Park network two nights ago we simply got a message that said the DNS was unreachable. If you read the blog two nights ago you know that I ended up trouble shooting my private uplink device in order to get on line. I suppose for our next trip I’m going to have to buy a mobile hot spot so Concetta can attach with her IPad as well. Nuf said on that subject.

Barbecue grills can often be a topic of conversation. We've seen awesome ones, and we've seen terrible ones. Sometimes park owners will drop an old steel truck wheel in each camp and call it good. Others will put a grill on a stand like the one here at the KOA in San Antonio. Most times, however, you get a pretty beat up steel box with heavy duty steel rods across the top that haven't been cleaned or even wire brushed since the Israelites were still in Egypt. For that reason we carry a couple of medium-duty grill tops in case they might prove useful, as well as a couple of sturdy wire brushes. You have to watch what passes for a barbecue wire brush these days. One I bought at home depot lasted through just one grill cleaning at the Valley of Fire state park.

On the subject of price, there are things you can do as I’ve said. You can get a KOA discount card, a Good Sam Club discount card, and, I’ve heard, that if you get something called a “Passport America” card you can get half off at many RV parks. I’m going to check into that when we get back. Two nights ago, the RV park where we stayed in Fort Stockton, Texas, charged me about $42.00 and had non-existent internet. Though the park was otherwise acceptable, those folks are going to be the subject of an email to the Good Sam folks one of these nights when I’m feeling ornery.

Day Seventeen – Fort Stockton to Sonora, Texas

Yesterday was shopping day for the Happy Wanderers. Not only were we out of orange juice so we had to take our vitamins with fizzy grapefruit juice, but the bread was short, the bananas were gone, and we were seriously low on dishwashing liquid. So after leaving camp and grabbing a quick fill-up at a nearby gas station, we set off to find the nearest Wally World, the store that’s becoming our cherished home away from home. Though shopping there was once the epitome of poor taste as far as we were concerned, the store has become the one familiar face we can count on for what we have become, strangers in a strange land.

Fortunately, we had actually seen one while wandering through the town of Fort Stockton the day before. I knew from the RV park description that it was located very close to highway 285, the road on which we had been traveling most of the day since leaving the Carlsbad Caverns area in New Mexico. So, I did a circuit around part of the town hoping to see a sign that might direct me east or west along the Interstate 10 corridor along which the park supposedly lay. That’s when we saw the Wally World right on main street and made a mental note of its location. It was, therefore, a simple matter to repeat my steps from the previous day and, voilà, we were in business.

After loading up all the essentials for another week or so on the road, we jumped back on Interstate 10 going east with the intention of finding the Annie Riggs museum. I had only said to Concetta that we must watch for the museum’s point-of-interest sign on the freeway when she said, “next exit.” We’d gone precisely one mile on the freeway and then had to hit the exit.

As we have so often experienced on this journey, the presence of a sign on the freeway is no guarantee of further signage once you hit the surface streets at the bottom of the off ramp. Such was the case today. One sign on the interstate and we were flung into the oldest part of Fort Stockton with nary a word on just where we were to go next. No matter, since we’re always keen to explore, before long we had wandered around sufficiently to actually stumble over the location of the museum, had parked the rig, and had mounted the porch steps of what looked like an old hotel

This particular hotel looked like something out of the Victorian age, but beneath the newer clapboard exterior lay a much older building constructed of adobe. We didn’t have high hopes at first as the museum docent in charge refused to take our money due to the presence of ongoing “refurbishment.” Still, we hadn’t been there long when we fell into an easy conversation with the woman and learned just about everything that had ever happened on that site. Tales of murder and mayhem abounded. Divorce followed divorce for the one-time proprietress. Sheriff husbands killed in ambush. Miscreant boyfriends hung on courtyard oak trees. Good heavens, we thought, the folks in this town sure were a rowdy bunch.

The photo upper right is off Concetta pointing to our pushpin on the map. We were the first tourists to visit the museum from Carson City and our pushpin was almost the only one from Nevada. The Museum curator personally conducted us from room to room, relating the hotel's history as we went. It wasn’t long and we had not only learned the entire history of the town, the hotel, and the nearby fort, but we had begun to be introduced to nearby neighbors who were only too glad to continue the discussion. One old gentleman even led me over to his house, revealing in the process that the structure had been the town’s terminus of the Butterfield Stage Line back in the day (photo left). I spent at least a half hour with the old-timer, a chap named “Nall,” learning most of his history from his birthday forward.

Pretty soon we were lining up the neighbors for photos, buying books on western history from the museum collection, and interviewing the gardener to ask about the archaeological potential for the property. At some point it occurred to me that we might have to scope out a house to buy in town because they weren’t going to let us leave any time soon. I think I shook hands with nearly everyone about twelve times while edging toward the door and finally said that we just HAD to go visit the nearby military facility while it was still daylight. The folks at the hotel allowed as how that would be a good idea and finally waved goodbye as we dashed for the truck.

The old military fort that had begun history for the town of Fort Stockton (named after the same guy that Stockton, California was named for) was just a half dozen blocks away and turned out to be pretty interesting. We spent another hour thoroughly touring all the reconstructed buildings, watching the videos in the museum, and taking a ton of photos. About the time we had decided to break it off and retrace our steps to the RV I discovered that my good old reliable Nikon had taken it upon itself to edit my endeavors and I subsequently lost some of the most interesting shots. As you might guess, I was one mighty irritated human.

But no matter, we had a really great time in Fort Stockton (the town and the fort itself), made some friends, learned some history, and were none the worse for wear in the end. I did lose a very nice shot of me sitting on an old covered wagon that had been used in a couple of John Wayne movies when the camera malfunctioned, but there’s always going to be, as Mary Chapin Carpenter puts it, “stones in the road” of life. With the sun high overhead we bid farewell to Fort Stockton and headed for Interstate 10 and further Happy Wanderer adventures.

Several hours later, as the sun set behind the Netleaf oak–covered hills of northwest Texas, we could be found in a secluded and tiny little RV park on the property of the Sonora Caverns facility near the town of the same name. Unlike most of our previous RV parks this trip, the Sonora facility had, at the time, exactly TWO of us in residence. There’s no sewer connection available and I had to explain twice what WiFi was before the resident agent told me, “well, no, we don’t have none of that.” But it was truly idyllic there. There were peacocks and deer wandering the grounds, a rock shop to explore, and a whole lot of nothing in all directions. There WAS a biker gang in residence when we drove up, their members lounging on the porch, but they seemed to be peaceable enough and I suspected that they were more of the “certified public account” types of cycle guys than the “kill ya for fun” types. Slowly, as the evening wore on, the tiny park began to fill up. By nightfall we had about five neighbors and even met a few as they took their evening constitutional. One couple I chatted with hailed from the California Gold Country just a stone’s throw from where we live in Nevada and, of all things, close to Lodi where we went to purchase this RV. We had a lively conversation on a variety of subjects and I was happy, at one point, to learn that they had been married for over fifty years and had spent at least a third of that time RVing. Finally, as they strolled back towards their home on wheels, I watched them go and smiled. Yup, this is the life.

Day 16 - Carlsbad, New Mexico to Fort Stockton, Texas

I have to tell you that southern New Mexico and northwestern Texas has not been our friend so far. Oh, it's not the people, they're perfectly charming. It's the damn oil boom. Who knew there was an oil boom going on? Everywhere you look there's nothing but a sea of dusty white trucks full of oil rig equipment, 18-wheelers in long convoys coming at you in endless processions, and RV parks full of, more or less, permanent residents. You can tell they're permanent because their rigs look like they haven't moved in months, if not years. Some of them have become so sedentary that their owners have fashioned decks and patios and dog runs on their tiny patch of ground. There's even ATVs and dirt bikes parked in every nook and cranny. Come night fall, one by one, each and every RV (usually a fifth wheel trailer) will accumulate one of the aforementioned white pickups covered with a layer of mocha-colored dust, attesting to the fact that each semi-permanent resident is not only employed, but most like doing oil work out in the wilds of the Texas plains.

Last night, you may remember, my truncated blog entry bore some of the feelings that I was experiencing trying to upload my material to the web. Unfortunately, though my laptop showed a "connected" message, seldom was any traffic from my computer allowed. Today, when we checked into the officially-sanctioned Good Sam park in Fort Stockton, Texas, I was quick to ask the young lady holding my credit card if I was going to experience good WiFi reception in the Fort Stockton park. Gleefully, she told me, more or less, "in your dreams." It turns out that all of these oil field workers who have taken up all the park spaces for months at a time think it's within their rights to stream videos from the web on their big screen TVs and the throughput in the RV park has dwindled to a trickle or worse.

Sigh! What has this world come to? I'm sure I don't know. Anyway, out of desperation I finally got around to finding out why my mobile uplink device insists on dialing an out-of-work waitress in southern Idaho. She even called me back while we were in Phoenix to find out why I was bothering her during her favorite soaps. Anyway, story short, I called the company to find out why they have done me wrong and talked to a young lady whose English is coming along quite nicely. She informed me that since I didn't use my uplink device in the last three months they had turned off the account. But, I protested, I only use this device in the motor home. Isn't it somewhat moronic to turn it off because it doesn't get used all the time. There was a long silence on her end, then she proceeded to reiterate the company policy to me in case I hadn't understood.

Anyway, long story even shorter, she was able to inform me that if I only rebooted eleven times, re-insert the uplink device another half dozen, all my troubles would go away. Making sure that I had obtained the necessary ID info from the young lady, I asked if I could try trouble shooting it myself and I'd call her back if I needed her. So, shortest version, I reinstalled the software, updated the new ID info, and I was in business. It's pretty sad when a supposed IT professional tries to bullshit an IT professional, however I'm glad I didn't let on how hopeless I thought she was.

I've been wanting to visit the Carlsbad Caverns all my life, or at least since I was twelve years old or so. Today, only fifty odd years later, I got my wish. The National Parks people were quite gracious and let Concetta and me in the front door for zero dollars owing to our National Park Pass for oldsters that we presented. We did spring for the five bucks apiece for the audio tour gizmo. The little device really worked great even though it was more than 750 feet below street level in the deepest part of the cave we visited. I'm not sure if we were allowed to take flash photos, though it seemed the ranger person said no. So I tried doing available light photography, which was a BIG challenge since there wasn't much of that precious light around. But even after I erased about two dozen blurry photos that reminded me of something one might shoot from a moving bus, I still ended up with a few decent ones.

Concetta and I walked the better part of the morning down a long series of switchbacks, some steeper than others, but all done in rough-coated concrete to prevent slipping and all accompanied by great hand railings. It was the absolute epitome of comfort, though it helped that we had worn our hiking boots as many of the passages were fairly steep. The part of the tour that just boggled our minds was when they told us that the caverns had once, some 200 million years ago, been part of an aquatic reef resting just beneath the surface of an inland sea. This caused, over time, hundreds of feet of limestone to be laid down as ancient reef creatures died and sank to the bottom. It's hard to imagine over 700 feet of limestone sea creature remnants, but that's what we saw. You really get some idea of the passage of time down there in the bowels of the earth, especially when you see these huge stalagmites and stalactites that have grown ONE drip at a time over tens of thousands of years. You can't help but appreciate the magnificent ancientness of our planet.

Accessing the caverns is very, very easy as the roads are great and there is ample room to park your motor home or trailer quite removed from the regular car parking. And, you can take a number of different length hikes to your liking, as well as sign on for ranger-led hikes to parts of the cave not accessible without the guy in the green suit by your side.

After eating lunch in the parking lot overlooking the dusty Texan plains, we set out once more to see what adventures we might find. We retraced our steps back north nearly to the town of Carlsbad, then angled off on route 285 that wore away towards the southeastern border of New Mexico. This part of our country sort of disappointed me. I don't know whether it's the aforementioned oil boom going on, or whether these folks haven't watched the anti littering commercials for the past sixty-five years or so, but Route 285 was festooned with more tons of litter per lineal mile than I have seen since I last visited the Carson City landfill. I mean there was just a bewildering amount of the stuff. Still, we were busy listening to a half dozen Agatha Cristie short mysteries on the disk player and just tried to focus on that.

One thing that has noticeably improved since we ambled into the great state of Texas is the temperature. Though I had not expected to encounter much in the way of freezing temperatures when we left Carson City and headed south, quite the opposite has been true. At the Grand Canyon it got down to the high twenties at night and we weren't allowed to keep our water supply lines hooked up over night. A couple of nights ago in Holbrook, New Mexico, there was ice on the side of the RV when I went out to coil up the supply line. But today, it really felt like we had encountered summer. We even had to throw open all the windows and rooftop vents as soon as we set up in Fort Stockton this afternoon.

Well, I don't want to use up all the minutes on my uplink device in one night so I'll say, adios amigos. Keep on traveling!

Day Fifteen -- Santa Rosa to Carlsbad, New Mexico

Well, as is so often said, you can't win them all. I say that because once again we're fighting a sub-standard, coma-producing slow internet here in the Carlsbad RV park. Not only is the internet slow but they have made no provisions for people with IPads which require a slightly different set of procedures to attach than lapstops. And yet we almost didn't get to stay here. We tried calling ahead, but got only a recorded message. I told their recorder that we were 60 miles away and wanted to stay the night. The recorder said they'd call back. They didn't. Sooooo, when we got here all the full service sites were spoken for and that means I'll have to use the dump station when I leave rather than be hooked up at the site. That I can live with, but slow (and sometimes slower than slow) internet is just not excusable. Nowadays you have to watch any of the KOAs because they use something called "Tengo" internet, short for "I have" in Spanish. In their dreams, I'd say. The last KOA at which we stayed definitely DIDN'T HAVE IT, "Tengo" or not. But our experience so far is that Good Sam recommended parks are pretty good. That was our experience until today.

But enough of that rant, let’s talk about today’s events. Between leaving Santa Rosa up on Route 40 this morning and our arriving at the "lousy internet" RV park here in Carlsbad we have been picking our way south down some of the most casually maintained roads in the country. But we didn't mind, even though we couldn't listen to our book on tape because the paved washboard road caused the tape player to skip. Still, that was okay because we got to visit the official Billy the Kid grave site and museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Though Billy the Kid has never been one of MY favorite old west miscreants, I have always wanted to visit the site of the Lincoln County War here in New Mexico. (By the way, that's Billy and me in the upper left)

Here’s what Wiki says about good ol’ Billy:

William H. Bonney (born William Henry McCarty, Jr. c. November 23, 1859 – c. July 14, 1881), better known as Billy the Kid (also known as Henry Antrim) was a 19th-century Irish American gunman who participated in the Lincoln County War and became a frontier outlaw in the American Old West. According to legend, he killed 21 men, but it is generally believed that he killed between four and nine. He killed his first man in 1877 at the age of 17, although he could have been as young as 15.

McCarty (or Bonney, the name he used at the height of his notoriety) was 5'8" tall with blue eyes, blond hair or dirty blond hair, and a smooth complexion. He was described as being friendly and personable at times, and as lithe as a cat. Contemporaries described him as a "neat" dresser who favored an "unadorned Mexican sombrero". These qualities, along with his cunning and celebrated skill with firearms, contributed to his paradoxical image as both a notorious outlaw and a folk hero.

Billy was relatively unknown during most of his lifetime but was catapulted into legend in 1881 when New Mexico's governor, Lew Wallace, placed a price on his head. In addition, the Las Vegas Gazette (Las Vegas, New Mexico) and the New York Sun carried stories about his exploits. Other newspapers followed suit. Several biographies written about Billy the Kid after his death portrayed him in varying lights.

If you want to read more, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_the_Kid

(By the way, that's the Kid murdering Robert Ollinger in photo #2)

Well, as is so often said, you can't win them all. I say that because once again we're fighting a sub-standard, coma-producing slow internet here in the Carlsbad

Well, as is so often said, you can't win them all. I say that because once again we're fighting a sub-standard,

Day Fourteen - Grants, New Mexico to Santa Rosa, New Mexico

So Concetta and I set up tonight in the little town of Santa Rosa, about 120 miles east of Albuquerque, along the historic path of Route 66. Some of the town is up and coming, especially since Interstate 40 affords the tiny berg a total of three whole exits. Other parts are, well, a little dead looking, as you might expect for a town that Route 66 forgot back in 1985, nearly 30 years ago. So, here and there, long dead filling stations with weedy asphalt and ugly, pastel-colored motels with boarded up windows dot the landscape. In between, where similar 1950s era detritus has long ago disappeared, you find brand new hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-related businesses flourishing. It's rather startling, but nice to see that dead doesn't mean dead forever, zombies not withstanding.

I first traveled Route 66 way back in the glory days of the late 1960s. That's when I joined the U.S. Navy. Soon after joining I was having second thoughts about serving aboard a U.S. Navy war ship way down in the bowels of some hot-as-Hell engine room where, they said, they intended to put me. Instead, I volunteered for the U.S. Naval Air Corp when a chance piece of junk mail caught my attention and I saw that they were looking for volunteers. All I had to do was extend my previous two-year enlistment for another year, wear a different color of shoe (brown instead of black), and agree to fly around in largely obsolete 1940s vintage airplanes at altitudes too low to safely jump out of in case of trouble.

Piece of cake, I told them. Where do I sign? Anyway, when they asked me just where I'd like to spend my time flying in these airplanes I told them places like Jacksonville, Florida or Point Magoo, California. They nodded and smiled and assigned me to Chicago. So it was that in October of 1969 I and my recently-acquired '65 Chevy Chevelle set out driving from Los Angeles on the much storied Route 66. It was my first time away from home, literally. No, really! As a kid I never even indulged in sleepovers at friend's houses. With no time to do my growing up little by little, I headed east along Route 66 to do my growing up all at once.

So, as you might guess, traveling along Route 40 most of the day within sight of many of the old stretches of Route 66, I got to relive a few memories. Not many, mind you, as my 64-year-old brain hasn't actually retained much of that trip. I know it took six days to get there, which meant six motels and maybe as many as two score restaurants, but as fate has decreed, I don't remember a single one of those. I do remember certain parts of the road and a few roadside attractions, but mostly it's just an overall nostalgia for the journey that remains.

The town of Grants where we stayed last night is only about 75 miles west of Albuquerque and so we had hardly gotten started this morning when we stopped again to visit a couple of museums we found in the guide book. For some reason our GPS refused to take us to the Art Museum, our planned first stop, so I just took the Interstate 40 turn-off to old town Albuquerque and then took a convenient side street before we actually reached old town. I pulled over and told Concetta that we'd need to study the problem and try and figure out where we were in relation to the Art Museum. As fate so often has it for us, we accidentally turned onto the exact street that flanked the Art Museum and, seeing that, pulled to the curb in the next block which had plenty of space for the RV and no attendant signs proclaiming that we couldn't, indeed, park there.

Although art museums are seldom my first choice for entertainment, I have to say that the Albuquerque Art Museum is just stunning in it's design and execution. We saw everything from modern paintings and statuary to equestrian-related accoutrements from the time of Mexican Vaqueros and Spanish ranchos (photo 3). We saw paintings from artists as well known as N.C. Wyeth, to the work of several "up and coming" new artists. They have a wonderful, art-related book store, a small cafe in case you get hungry or thirsty, and an overall clean and spacious facility that welcomes visitors both young and old. I would not hesitate to visit the museum again should I be passing through town.

The top two paintings were just two of my favorites today and there was no prohibition against photographing them. I, of course, didn't use any flash which they might have frowned upon. There was only one part of the museum that I would like to have shown you as it was the most magnificent part of our experience. That exhibit held a variety of paintings, handcrafted furniture, and carvings in various themes done by Spaniards in the new world after the arrival of Columbus. We just loved it and spent nearly an hour in that one exhibit alone.

Around noon we left the art museum and walked back to the RV for lunch. That's a part of RVing I just love, love, love. I don't have to pay anything (much) and I can have my personally-made coffee, a sandwich, and a couple of homemade cookies in the privacy of my own "home" without any muss or fuss. And lots of times we can have any vista we want as a backdrop for our lunch table. Today we had the city park, filled with trees and sunshine, and it was wonderful.

After lunch we consulted our watches and decided we could still get to Santa Rosa at a decent hour if we spent 60 to 90 minutes at the

Natural History Museum, which, wouldn't you know it, was just across the street from where we had parked. That's kind of a rushed itinerary. If you've ever tried to hurry through a Natural History Museum you soon find that the quantity of things to see there is nothing short of mind boggling. This museum today was no exception. Still, we concentrated on the pre-history exhibits involving some of our favorite subjects: dinosaurs and rocks. Man, they sure had plenty of each of those.

So, as I said, here we are in Santa Rosa, New Mexico at the aptly named Santa Rosa RV Park. Tonight we broke with our two-week-long tradition of eating dinner in the RV and accepted our host's offer to serve us dinner in the Park's restaurant. I had the brisket, potato salad, and beans dish, which I adored. Concetta had the somewhat less than thrilling catfish dish (I told her to order the brisket) and wasn't quite as complimentary of the fare. Still, it was nice to stay out of the RV kitchen tonight and avoid the attendant chore of doing the dishes. That left me time to work on the blog, recounting the day's events, and Concetta a chance to have a shower and do her hair, then settle in with a good book.

I don't know how many of you listen to books on tape on your long drives, but Concetta and I listen most of the time while we're RVing. We've had several great books so far this trip, including a decent thriller by Lisa Scottoline, and a great shoot-um-up thriller by the tried and true John Sandford. Now we're listening to the extremely well written book, Frankie Machine, by Don Winslow, an author who is new to me. This story about a retired mob hit man and his efforts to stay alive once the mob decides he has to go. I'll tell you, the story is nothing short of riveting. I'm going to have to track down more stories by Winslow, assuming he has more, and queue him up for a future trip.

So, I guess that's it for now. Today turned out to be one of the best days we've had so far. The wind has died down considerably making the driving much easier. And even though we had to travel the interstate for much of the day, tomorrow we get to jump onto one of the less traveled byways as we head south toward Roswell and Carlsbad. Not sure how far we'll get, nor just what we'll encounter along the way, but I sure hope I get to see Fort Sumner where Billy the Kid had his run-in with Pat Garrett.

For now, I wish you Happy Traveling. Ciao!

Day thirteen - Holbrook, Arizona, to Grant, New Mexico

I always thought that northern Nevada specialized in wind. Well, we found a place today that could certainly give Nevada a run for its money in that category. As I told a fellow camper this afternoon after we had set up our rig in Grants, New Mexico, the wind blew so hard today as we traveled along route 40 out of Arizona that I probably only put any wear on the downwind tires. The upwind tires felt like they only occasionally touched the pavement.

Our route this morning out of Holbrook, Arizona, was a bit circuitous. After gassing up at a station adjacent to our KOA camp (don't stay at the Holbrook camp -- the WiFi is terrible) we headed back the way we had come the previous day so we could visit the old courthouse and tour the museum now housed there (photo right). It was early, about 9:00 a.m., and we turned out to be the only patrons of the museum. We got to wander the halls, move the "don't touch this" signs so I could get better photos, and generally make ourselves comfortable. The building is not in very good shape, owing I expect to the fact that the whole town looks pretty run down and tired. I think back in the Route 66 days the town fathers probably had more money to spend, but now that Interstate 40 blasts by the town without looking back the old municipal building is beginning to sag and leak a bit. Still, we had a great time wandering the halls and reading the faded captions.

Of course, I'm in heaven whenever and wherever I can spend an hour or two with a whole building full of antiquated equipment and rusty junk. My favorite part of the museum was the typewriter display (photo left). There was just acres of law books which I gazed at in some wonder. How in the world does a lawyer know what's in all those books? You weren't supposed to touch the books and I honored that request, but I sure would have liked to see if anyone had ever opened them.

The museum had literally everything from a cowboy chuck wagon to an empty court room where you could sit and pretend you were a judge. It also had a basement jail which, having seen it, left me with the distinct impression that crime doesn't pay, at least it wouldn't for me. Most of the displays would have been more interesting to a local resident, but we still found enough to see and appreciate to make the stop worthwhile.

After the museum we backtracked further south along yesterday's Route 77 until we encountered Jim Gray's Petrified Wood store. Included with our check-in materials from the Holbrook KOA was a coupon for a free piece of the ancient rock and so we thought we'd just go and collect. Of course the petrified wood store coupon was just meant to get tourists in the door and it served well in that capacity. But even though we had no intention of buying some ruinously expensive piece of 200-million-year-old pre-history, we DID want to see what other tourists were buying. Let me just say that the store is well worth a visit even if you don't intend to buy anything. Somewhere nearby, the clerk informed me, was a starving artist doing the cutting and polishing of those magnificent rocks and I just loved his work. My favorite were the bookends, which cost in the neighborhood of $100.00 and up. I was sorely tempted to buy a set, but space in the motorhome being a premium I decided to pass up the deal. We had so much fun looking at all the lovely polished stones and ancient sea creatures that we forgot to collect our free piece of petrified wood. No matter, the experience was worth the stop.

Since Gray's shop lay right at the intersection that led, so the sign said, to the Petrified Forest, you know where we went next. Seventeen miles and mere minutes later we were pulling abreast of the park service check-in shack presenting our credentials. I might mention at this point that if you buy a National Parks pass at the park headquarters in Carson, your out-of-pocket costs for visiting most of our National treasures are zip. The park ranger asked us if we were carrying any petrified wood and of course we were carrying a sample that the Holbrook museum had traded us for a small donation to their cause. Handing it over, I sheepishly recounted where we had obtained the item and the ranger asked for the sample so he could confine it to a plastic bag, zipped-tied shut, to prevent us from being arrested when we later left the park for petrified wood snatching.

For some reason, just about the time we entered the park, a near hurricane-force southwesterly wind kicked up and turned our much anticipated visit to see the stone trees and nearby painted desert into a sort of endurance contest. We did stop at the visitor center and watch the video, which thankfully did much to bolster our understanding of just how the petrified logs we saw on our brief stroll outside the center had come to be where they now lay instead of near present day Panama where they had originally formed.

The wind was blowing so hard, and raising dust clouds that might easily rival those from the dust bowl days of the American depression, that we had to view the painted desert from the comfort of our vigorously rocking RV. No matter. Even with the dust the vistas into the canyon of the painted desert were well worth coming to see.

Leaving the park we headed east toward Albuquerque. We didn't plan on staying at that infamously difficult to spell New Mexico city, but planned on stopping short in the town of Grants. Here we had read in the Good Sam travel guide that the Bar-S RV park was well worth a visit. The Bar-S proved easy enough to find since they put giant red and yellow signs nearly everywhere as you approached Grants. So by 4:00 p.m. we had found the park, got the coach set up with water, sewer, and electricity, and had even set out on a wind-blown walk over to the nearby Native American craft store. On the way I noticed that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks ran quite near us. Going back to the grade crossing some time later I managed to capture a photo of the next passing train. I thought I had been extremely lucky since the train came by almost as soon as I showed up to photograph it. Silly me, we now realize that a train goes by either east to west or west to east about every ten to fifteen minutes without fail. If you're a dyed in the wool "train spotter" you're going to just love this RV park and the adjacent rail line.

My train spotting adventure didn't end at the approach of the bright orange locomotive. Though I have shot countless locomotives and trains in my lifetime, I had never attempted to shoot some of the wildly creative art that "decorates" many, many pieces of rolling stock these days. The particular train that I had come to shoot this day was hauling a near endless collection of new cars in covered, two-story flatcars. You may remember, if you're old enough, that new cars were once hauled out in the open air on double-decker flats for all the world to appreciate. But at some point kids started throwing things at the new cars as they passed by, which resulted in a lot of damage. So, the railroads built roofs over the flat cars which deflected most of the missiles. Nowadays those same kids have taken a new tack and begun to channel their energy into graffitizing freight cars, including the covered, car-carrying flats. The engineer was coming fast, but I did manage to grab a few shots by panning with the speed of the train. High times!