Day 25 - Vadalia to St. Francisville, Louisiana

Last night we were treated to the very WORST thunder, lightening, and rain storm either one of us had ever experienced in this life. At dinner time the weather was just fine and I was out on the road in front of the RV taking photos of the nearby Mississippi River bridge. A short time later it started to sprinkle a bit. We thought we heard faint rumblings of thunder way off in the distance. About the time we were crawling into bed around 10:00 p.m., the skies cracked open and Niagara Falls proceeded to dump a day's accumulation of water on us. Thunder and lightening began coming so fast it was like we'd been transported into the middle of the battle of Gettysburg. Cannons boomed and brilliant explosions of white light were bursting all around us. Pretty soon hurricane-force winds were tearing at the coach, making it shudder and sway. At one point I wondered if we might get to see our first tornado, perhaps as it lifted us up and dumped us into the nearby river. Fortunately that didn't happen, but for the next hour we had to just cower under the covers as the canons boomed and the explosions of lightening turned night into day.

But if yesterday turned out to be pretty off-putting, today was as close to perfect as we could honestly wish for. The sun came out, a light breeze kicked up, fleecy clouds scudded overhead, and Concetta and I spent all morning hoofing it around Natchez, Mississippi, just to see the sights and rub elbows with the locals.

Of course, Natchez has been on my bucket list since I was perhaps twelve years old and read -- maybe I should say devoured -- Mark Twain's, "Life on the Mississippi." Ah, to be a river boat pilot and expertly nudge your bow up to the teeming dock at "Natchez Under the Hill" to take on a load of cotton. What mental images that always invoked for me. So, today was the day I got to live the dream. Though we didn't venture down to the docks, we had a truly wonderful time wandering the oldest business and residential sections of Natchez on the hill. Everywhere we looked lay something colorful and nostalgic to photograph. Good thing I wasn't shooting film.

Our son Rob has been urging us to try eating what the locals eat so today we made a special point to do just that. As noon approached we wandered into a cozy restaurant called "Hot Biscuits and Cool Blues." Concetta had "crawfish corn chowder" and I had the special, "red beans and rice" which came with Andouille sausage and was just to die for. Along with this repast came the best biscuits you ever had in your life.

Today we spent most of the day on the Mississippi/Louisiana border, running on highway 61, and Concetta wants y'all to know that it's definitely the prettiest patch of country we've been in yet. So much greenery. So many flowers. It's just stunning. Of course there are other things to look at besides the local flora. Though I haven't done much roadside stopping to snap photos, I'm planning on doing a photo study one of these afternoons when I see a good subject. One subject that has me intrigued since we arrived in the south is abandoned houses. It seems to me that when a family gets tired of their house, they just move out and there sits the empty house forever more. Year after year it stands empty, melting into the ground, windows broken, a yard full of belongings. You see them everywhere, vines covering the front facade, roofs caving in, doors falling off hinges. It's eerie. They never seem to get torn down, like they're somehow untouchable. Like no one wants to get near them.

Traveling along route 61 today on our way to Baton Rouge we spotted a sign that said, "turn left here to see an honest to God plantation." At the first opportunity to reverse direction we went back. Moments later we were threading our way down this tiny little lane just inches wider than our RV. After about a mile we came around a bend and encountered an equally tiny bridge, looking, for all the world, like something that harkened back to the Civil War. The bridge came with an accompanying sign that warned us against actually driving on the bridge if you weighed more than a pickup load of watermelons. Deciding that we didn't want to find out if the RV weighed more than said watermelons, we backed around and beat it back to the highway.

Naturally, this got us in the mood for touring a real life plantation. When, just a few miles down the road, we responded to a historic interest sign for St. Francisville, we pulled onto a side road and soon found ourselves at a tiny museum and visitors center in the aforementioned town. It was here that the docent in residence recommended that we drive east a few miles along Louisiana route 10 and visit the Rosedown Plantation that, as fate would have it, was doing a tour of the house and grounds, the last tour of the day, in another hour. Needless to say, we got the RV turned around and beat it over there.

Let me just tell you that visiting Rosedown turned out to be the best thing we did all day. The plantation was just marvelous, inside and out. The gardens were just chock full of camellia bushes as tall as a house, and azalea bushes so brilliant in color that they just took your breath away. We had about forty-five minutes to wander the grounds before the tour was to begin and we took full advantage of the opportunity. I suspect that the garden encompassed around two acres and was criss-crossed with winding paths and secluded glens. Every so often you'd come around bend in the path and encounter a gazebo, a fountain, or some Greek statuary. Though the gardens looked like they could use a bit of tending (at least more than they were getting), it was still fun and richly rewarding to see.

The inside of the house was equally interesting for it's adherence to period design and decoration. Even though the plantation had gone through a series of owners since the original owner died in 1861, subsequent owners not only kept much of the decor, but what they did replace they did according to the original owner's design and purchase records. So, the house has it's original furniture in many cases, handmade wallpaper that matches the original, and even things like dishes and personal effects are original. The guide, unlike what you usually encounter in such tours, didn't get all hot and bothered when someone (that would be me) wandered away from the tour to shoot photos where the crowd of tour goers were not presently standing.

Consequently, I got to shoot photos pretty much wherever and whenever I wanted provided I didn't use a flash. The little Nikon does really well in low light so not using a flash was a piece of cake. The owner of the plantation had, back in the antebellum times, as many as four separate plantations and owned 450 slaves. Later he would manage as many as ten more. He must have been some businessman.

So, right now we're holed up in a tiny backwater of a RV park known "Shelby J's." We chose this place because it's just a few miles down the road from the Plantation house and it seemed too darned convenient to pass up. When we arrived I asked some of the other guests where I could find the manager, and they said they didn't really know since she didn't live on the property. They did give me a phone number to call. When I called, a lady told me to back in next to the old brown mobile home set up on blocks, pull the electrical cord out from underneath said old brown mobile home, and with luck I'd find the necessary water and sewer connections near the back fence. Said she'd be over directly to collect the entrance fee. That was about three hours ago and we still haven't seen her.

To say this place is on the casual side would be like saying that Barney Fife was not exactly a front line law enforcement officer. Still, I found the cord under the mobile as suggested and everything seem to work okay. The ground is a little on the "spongy" side from all the rain so I think my rear wheels are slowly sinking into the ground, the 17 dogs that the various semi-permanent residents have tied to their semi-permanent rigs set up a howl at the slightest disturbance, and the crickets sound like they're on steroids. But aside from those minor "stones in the road," everything is just right with the world. Amen!

Day 24 - Cypress Bend to Vadalia, Louisiana

Today we were hoping to reach Natchez, Mississippi, from our truly wonderful (and wet) camp in Cypress Bend, Louisiana, but it was not to be. The reason is we spent so much time in the charming town of Natchitoches that it had gotten to be 5:00 p.m. and we hadn't crossed the mighty Mississippi River, let alone found a camp for the night. So, we stopped on the Louisiana side in the little town of Vadalia.

Traveling on rural route 6 from Cypress Bend, and then along route 84, we encountered some wonderfully green countryside today. And when I say green, I mean GREEN. Then, about mid morning, we came upon Natchitoches (the natives pronouce it "Nak-a-dish") and we decided to do some walking and see the town.

Natchitoches bills itself as the oldest continually inhabited town in Louisiana. Founded in 1714 by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, Natchitoches was originally established as a French outpost on the Red River to facilitate trade with the Spanish in Mexico. Once a bustling river port and crossroads, Natchitoches gave rise to vast cotton kingdoms along the river. Affluent planters not only owned charming country plantations, but kept elegant houses in town.

We found a great place to park about two streets west of the town's main street, a dirt lot provided free of charge by the town court and police department. Leaving the RV, we set off on foot to find the town museum, which we did just moments later. While the museum housed both a historical museum and a sports museum, we sort of breezed by the sports stuff (except for their display of a Bonneville Salt Flats Racer) and headed to the stuff we mutually love, the historic displays. They had everything from womens' fashions to a bale of cotton and everything in between.

Once more back on the street, we retraced our steps to the RV, had our lunch, then set off again to explore the town proper. I had seen, as we drove into town, all the wonderful old architecture and I was just itching to go shoot some photos. The main street in Natchitoches looks much as I imagine streets look like in New Orleans. Lots of iron lattice work balconies. Lots of brick. And gardens tucked into every nook and cranny. One house I really wanted to photograph was the "Steel Magnolias" house from the movie (photo left & above right) that we had seen as we drove down the narrow main street that morning.

There's lots of things to see and do in Natchitoches. We didn't even scratch the surface. We saw loads of B&Bs. We heard that there was a plantation you could visit east of town. There was even a river walk. I would have loved to stay in the area and explore more, but if we keep stopping every fifty miles to camp we're going to take a year to get home again. We just had to travel on, though we didn't leave town until 2:30 p.m.

After a really nice two plus hour run from Natchitoches we arrived in Vadalia, Louisiana. The RV park is right on the banks of the Mississippi River. I mean, it's about three hundred feet from where the RV is set up. Not since the spring of 1970 have I been this close to Ol' Man River. It was in that year that the U.S. Navy decided they'd send me to electronics school in Memphis (really Millington) Tennessee. I drove my car down from Chicago where I had been stationed since the previous October, and spent the next four months learning about resistors and capacitors and electrical theory and such. Unfortunately, while I understood electrical theory on paper, I didn't do so hot when I had to put the theory into practice and troubleshoot a broken radar unit.

I was in Memphis for four months and it was the first time that I had been south of the Mason-Dixon line. At the time I thought Tennessee was the hottest, muggyist, rainingist place on the planet. It never rained, as the saying goes, but it poured. And it didn't just pour, it would rain so hard you couldn't drive your car because the wipers were useless against the deluge. But I had some great times during that four months, as two or three fellow sailors and I would wander the countryside, whenever we were allowed, just looking for adventure. I was one of the only sailors at electronics school with his own car. Virtually the entire student body had come to Memphis directly from bootcamp and had not been to their respective homes yet.

It was on one of our adventures, that the bunch of us found our way to the eastern banks of the Mississippi where we all sat on a lazy afternoon in quiet contemplation, just watching the river roll by. None of us had ever seen anything so magnificent as the mighty Miss. Then, as we we sat there, we started to notice, way off in the distance, black clouds forming on the western horizon. Minutes later, before we could even react, the storm clouds came rolling towards us at the speed of a freight train. It seemed like in mere moments the blackness was overhead and it had started to rain in Tennessee's usual ferocious fashion. I still regard that afternoon as one of the most memorable of my life. (Note: the bridge above right is over the Mississippi from Vadalia to Natchez, Mississippi).

Day 23 - Rusk, Texas to Cypress Bend, Louisiana

Well, last night we made it to Louisiana, or at least the place on the map purported to be Louisiana. So far all we’ve seen is water. Water on the roads. Water in the air. Water dripping off trees. Water dripping off our noses. Water on both sides of the highway in endless swampy pools. In fact, as the rain pounded down upon our little tin-covered home in Cypress Bend RV park beside Lake Toledo, we’re beginning to think that sooner or later we would be needing a submarine to rescue us from all the wet. Yesterday evening as we listened to the final disk of our most recent murder mystery, it was raining so hard outside that it sounded like someone was blasting us with a fire hose. It was, in fact, so loud that we had the disk player turned up all the way and the novel could barely be heard above the din.

Speaking of our latest novel on disk, we’ve been listening to “Bones to Ashes” by Kathy Reichs. It’s one Concetta picked out for us. Though I only rarely read mystery novels by female writers, I just loved this one. First of all, it was written in the first person, something that I almost always prefer in a mystery. Second, the story was so complex and multi-threaded that it had me hyperventilating as I waited for Concetta to put in a new disk each time one ended. All the parts were performed by Linda Emond who does such a variety of tonal voice variations and accents that you might be fooled into thinking more than one person was speaking. She’s simply outstanding.

I should probably explain about first person vs. over ways of telling a story. I like it when the main character is telling the tale and the reader learns about what he/she discovers as he or she is discovering it. Nowadays, writers tend to sort of cheat and have the tale told by an omniscient, God-like presence who is capable of getting inside everyone’s head, be they villain or hero, minor or major character. The omniscient narrator jumps from head to head, usually devoting a chapter to each, so that the reader knows everyone’s motivation, even if it’s not said out loud. Like I said, I consider this technique cheating. In real life we seldom know the motivation of the bad guys until the end. However, most readers have been spoiled by writers, like James Patterson, who use this technique exclusively because it sells well.

I should also probably explain my reticence about female mystery writers. It’s simple. Female mystery writers, let’s take Sue Grafton for example, spend way too much time involving themselves in the emotional lives of all the various characters. I simply don’t want my detective to do that. I want the detective to catch the bad guy by thinking like the bad guy, not like Dear Abbie. Yes, I know there are probably female writers who don’t do that. Kathy Reichs seems to be a terrific example, and I intend to seek out more of her books. I’m also open to suggestion, so send your favorite author suggestions to me and I’ll give them a try.

There was no internet at Cypress Bend, not even for my mobile device. We were so far back in the piney woods that I suspect if we didn’t dutifully add enough y’alls to the end of our sentences, they’d probably think we were spies and call Sheriff Buford to come haul us downtown for a bit of interrogation.

Today we spent most of our daylight hours in the town of Nocogdoches, the oldest settlement in the great state of Texas. Once again the taking of photographs was almost a waste of time since the only sunlight we saw was in the smile of the volunteer at the visitor center. Thank goodness for him, he made our morning and bestowed upon us reams of information about local places to visit that we ultimately never got to see because of the rain. Then, to add insult to injury, the battery in the camera went toes up on me, which made taking photos inside museums and so forth impossible as well.

By the time we left the visitor center it was time for lunch, so we hoofed it back to the coach where I ran the generator for a half an hour so I could charge the camera battery. We got lucky in Nacogdoches in that we stumbled over a HUGE parking area behind city offices that was provided for the public. We parked a good hundred feet from the nearest building and I don’t think anyone heard our generator at all.

Before leaving town we did a bit of shopping at our favorite emporium, Wally World, where I got to pick out a new sewer hose since ours is starting to develop cracks. I had to stretch it to its maximum allowable length the previous night in Rusk and I ended up having to seal up a two-inch tear with electrical tape. Not a good long term solution.

While at Wally World I finally got a “compass” so I can estimate distances better on our maps and campground guides. Because of the rain we didn't get much in the way of photos, but here's a couple I took the next morning when the rain had cleared up some.

Days 20, 21 & 22 - Knocking around Dallas/Fort Worth Texas

Texas is a place you have to experience first hand. It's no good reading about it in books or listening to the tall tales of your friends and relatives. When they say everything is BIGGER in Texas, residents are most likely talking about the portion size of the barbecue ribs or the expanse of border to border prairie. I get that for sure. But we've found lots of other things that seem bigger by far. For instance, when they decide to tear up part of their interstate highway system they don't piddle around with a half mile section where fifty guys can be found toiling away with earth movers and dump trucks for several months. No, here in Texas when they decide to refurbish the interstate they hire three thousand guys to tear up 30 miles or so of roadway and call it "just the beginning." Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth section of this giant state we've been driving by those four-foot-tall orange traffic barriers for so long that we're beginning to regard them as part of an invading army. They sort of look like pumpkin-colored aliens massing for some sort of takeover. Watch the news. If the country gets invaded by orange beings, I can tell you it's probably coming from Texas.

There's so many highways torn up around Dallas/Fort Worth that it sends our GPS unit into near apoplexy. One moment you're on the regular path of the highway where the lady inside the GPS unit expects you to be, and the next you're somewhere off on a nearby access road detour where she's just sure you've blatantly disregarded her carefully thought out instructions and/or lost your mind. So, you spend many minutes trying to comfort the little lady and move as quickly as you can back onto the original highway path before she completely abandons you to your fate.

Anyway, such has been our experience so far. Our mission in coming to D/FW was to visit my brother's daughter, Sherry, and her husband and two new babies. In addition I wanted to visit with my high school chum, Jorja, and her husband, Tim. Both parties lived nearly in the same geographic area. So, we tried to find a camping spot quite near both of them to cut down the travel time for visits. This we did, and quite surprisingly, we stumbled onto the Lakeside Public Campground in Lewisville, Texas, and it was beautiful.

In fact, the Lewisville camp was just about the most wonderful camp spot we've run across yet, what with all the mature trees and lake vistas. There was really only one potential downside, their lack of sewer connections. But before I could fret about that lack, the lady at the check-in counter said, "and that will be $8.00 please." Well, I couldn't argue with the price. We customarily pay at least $20.00, and often pay as much as $40.00 for a space. So, even though we would have to use a dump station on our way out the next morning it was well worth it.

Once we had established our claim to a spot for the night, we parked the RV in our designated space, had our lunch, then set out once again to find niece Sherry's home. This we did with the usual attendant confusion of the GPS as we threaded our way in and out of several construction confusion zones. Still, by early afternoon we had found the proper house, and were helping to entertain TWO newborns for a couple of hours, which took a little pressure off of mom.

After a couple hours of visiting and baby cuddling we hit the road again and found our way back to our lakeside camp. In quick time we had the truck all set up (easier without the sewer parts) and ready to go for the night. After that we arranged by Facebook to have my classmate from my John Muir High school days to pick us up and we all set out for a nearby restaurant for dinner. Though our intention was to find Italian food, the confusion of freeway construction sent us off in odd directions, and we eventually changed our plans to incorporate an Asian restaurant that we stumbled over. No matter, the restaurant turned out to be great, especially the egg rolls in my opinion (photo right). What followed was a rousing couple of hours of reliving our childhood adventures in southern California and, for Jorja's husband, Tim, and I, adventures in the U.S. Navy. Back in the mid 1960s, Jorja and I and a mutual chum spent many a blissful day on the ski slopes in the mountains above Los Angeles. Hard to fathom that it's been nearly forty years since those carefree days full of powder snow and happy camaraderie.

Though the crush of rush-hour traffic did not permit stopping for photos, on our way south out of Dallas this morning Concetta and I passed through and beneath some of the most impressive finished freeway construction we had ever seen. As many as six and seven levels of flyovers rose above us in some places, all displayed in designer colors and looking for all the world like something out of the Jetsons TV show. The complex of super highways over super highways was just the BIGGEST such project that we had ever seen, bar none and we were glad to have been able to appreciate the "after" since we'd put up with so much of the "before."

Soon, however, we were bound away to the southeast, driving semi-rural route 175 to avoid the more heavily traveled "blue" roads with their attendant bevy of speeding 18-wheelers. The weather continued rainy and gray, which made stopping for photos less than appealing. I do wish I had made one stop, though the photo op took place in the blink of an eye and we were past it before I could find a place to pull over. You may remember, if you've watched American Pickers for any length of time, that Mike Wolf is absolutely gaga over Volkswagens. Well today we passed a sort of Beetle graveyard as we rolled out of Dallas that truly dwarfed anything Mike has shown on his TV series. I kid you not when I say that this place had at least two hundred bugs and another hundred VW vans. And that may be a conservative estimate. It was an awesome collection!

The only photos I took today were of this sad little town with buildings arranged around a park-like square. Half the buildings were unused and the entire police department was ensconced in a storefront between a Laundromat and a nicknack store. But what pulled me off the main highway to explore down a side street, and to discover this particular town square, was the great old Coke sign on one of the abandoned buildings. It was too cool. There was not much else to see on the square as the whole place was just a few years away from disappearing altogether I suspect. They did have a really neat log cabin that I found when I rounded one corner off the square. Not sure how old it was, or whether it had been restored or just left alone for a century and a half, but I stopped to appreciate the workmanship of the builders) anyway.

Right now we're in a KOA in the town of Rusk which lies on a mountain top southeast of town and was almost deserted when we got here. Contrary to what we've been experiencing so far, we could almost pick the view we wanted as virtually all the camp spots were empty. Since then about six or eight others have arrived, but most sites are still empty. And, because there's not many folks to make use of it, the internet functions almost as good as we experience back home. Tomorrow we're drifting over to Nacogdoches which lies along route 21 running east from here. We've read that there's lots of interesting things to do there and we hope, since we did mostly driving today, that we'll be able to fritter away some quality time there. Nacogdoches is only about forty miles from the Louisiana border, so sometime tomorrow we're probably going to be leaving Texas.

I'm still formulating my opinion of the state. Parts of it are not very prosperous looking. Parts of it look very rich, like they have money to burn and intend to do so. And yet parts were so litter-strewn that we could scarcely believe it. Other parts were magnificent in their beauty. The roads are terrible. The roads are terrific. The people, wherever you see them, appear to be industrious and hard working. And they're always helpful and friendly, at least to us. We've liked the state and we've disliked it. We haven't liked the weather at all, as mostly it's been cold. The sole hot day we had was WAY too hot and muggy for our tastes, and it's only March. I suspect that come August we'd feel like we had wandered into Panama or somewhere like that.

You can't help but compare your home to wherever you're traveling and, of course, we've been doing that right along. Though I grew up in southern California (otherwise known as paradise on earth -- at least it was in the 1950s), I still prefer Carson City, Nevada to all the places through which we've traveled. So it's safe to say that there's no danger of our pulling up stakes and leaving our high desert home where the humidity barely exists and nearly every day is sunny and clear. But it does help to see these other places, if nothing more than to solidify that observation.

As of today we've been gone for 22 days and have driven over 3,000 miles in search of adventure. It may be inconvenient at times. The traffic may tax your patience and test your nerve, but there's nothing like hitting the road. There's something new and exciting around each and every corner. You just have to "Keep on Traveling!"

Day 19 - Bus tour of San Antonio

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do the tourist thing. Since the Happy Wanderers had already decided to stay an extra day in San Antonio, it came as a happy revelation when one of our fellow campers told us that a certain tour company actually came to the KOA park, picked up anyone who was interested in a conducted tour, and bused you all over San Antonio in search of history and adventure. Sounded like a winner to me.

So it was that bright and early the next morning we were ready and waiting at the KOA office trying not to be deterred by the cold temperatures and the gray, foreboding skies. Minutes later we were on our way downtown riding something that looked a lot like a San Francisco trolley and sort of jostled us around like an antique buckboard. It turned out that we wouldn't be touring San Antonio in our pickup vehicle, something for which I knew I'd be eternally grateful.

The collection point for the tour company was, of all places, right across the street from the Alamo, though we weren't to actually tour that long anticipated location until the afternoon. Once all the tourists from the many downtown hotel collection points had arrived, we discovered that we were to be a group of twenty-six humans and one very funny African American bus driver who never stopped regaling us with tales of old San Antonio even though he was destined to have the lot of us in his charge for the next eight hours.

Our first destination turned out to be a general tour and discussion of some of the city's most interesting historic commercial buildings, churches, and libraries. After that Ron, our driver, deposited us at a convenient access point to San Antonio's downtown canal and we spent a very enjoyable thirty to forty minutes floating through the heart of the river walk area. Because of the incessant wind and the cold temperatures I thought we'd be frozen stiff by the time we got back, but as it turned out everyone had a marvelous time and good ol' Ron had a warm bus waiting for us by the time we got back.

At one point the boat driver asked if anyone knew the movie, "Cloak and Dagger." I was the only one in the boat who raised his hand. "They shot the movie right here in these canal tunnels," she said, and added that I was the first one in a long time who remembered the movie. Not even Concetta remembered the film even though our son Rob had watched it so many times that we both memorized much of the dialogue. You might remember that Dabney Coleman played the imaginary hero, Jack Flack.

After the boat ride we all piled back on the bus and headed for our next surprise, the Buckhorn Saloon and Museum. The Buckhorn was certainly a tourist trap extraordinaire. They had everything from a stuffed Texas longhorn, to a manikin of Teddy Roosevelt. They had a replica of the Bonnie and Clyde car and all kinds of western gee gaws meant to dazzle one and all. But we just adored the place for it's absolutely WONDERFUL Texas Ranger room where you could really acquaint yourself with the history of that august law enforcement outfit. Since we only had about thirty minutes to see the whole museum we found ourselves pretty rushed to see everything and would gladly go back someday to spend more time with the Texas Rangers.

After the Buckhorn the driver talked a bunch of us into coming with him to his favorite Mexican restaurant while a few of the passengers chose to wander off in other directions. So it was that six of us stayed on the bus and ended up at a little hole in the wall place just a couple of blocks from the Alamo. Concetta and I and two other of our bus mates decided to grab a table together and we spent a very pleasurable hour swapping lies and talling tales of the RVing life. These two, John and Laura, haled from north of the Canadian border and had just come from spending an entire winter in Yuma, Arizona. John has more guts than me. I know because he drives a forty-foot Class A and pulls a twenty-foot covered trailer containing his car. That's sixty L-O-N-G feet of moving machinery. I only have thirty feet to ride herd on and I truly wouldn't want twice as much machine to try and maneuver into and out of the Wally World Parking lot, let alone the sometimes narrow spaces in an average RV Park.

After lunch it was time for the ALAMO!!! Now if you're like me, and have been studying the Alamo in school since you were knee high to a grasshopper, your curiosity has been peaked from a very early age. Bucket list or no bucket list, I knew that one day I just had to go and see it. Yes, I know that only a small percentage of the original "fort" exists now. The city has eaten up most of the open ground that was the 1840-era enclosure leaving only the mission-style church building and part of structure they call the "long barracks." But I didn't care. I just had to go and stand on the actual ground, take a few photos, and just commune with history.

The first thing you have to do is wait in this depressingly long line to get into the church proper. But don't worry, the line goes very, very fast. Almost before we had time to snap a few photos we were inside. Now if you wanted to read all the captions to all the various exhibits you'd really have to schedule an entire day. We didn't have that luxury so we had to concentrate and absorbing the essence of the place, inside and out, before good ol' Ron called us back to the bus. The only really disappointing part of our visit to the Alamo was the almost total lack of sunlight. To make good photos you need Mother Nature to cooperate and for our special day in San Antonio Mother Nature was off asleep somewhere. So, we just had to make do with the puny light we had.

After the Alamo we were back on the bus and headed for a whole laundry list of destinations. We saw a Japanese tea garden, two different 18th century missions, and a Mexican style "mercado" where I was fortunate to score a really nice belt of hand-tooled leather and Concetta picked up a nice dress for the new granddaughter. All in all, the day was a tremendous success and we were back in the cozy confines of our Tioga by dinner time. We even had time to run some of our accumulated dirty clothes through the park laundry machine while dinner was cooking. Though I consider the freeway system in San Antonio damn confusing and hair-raising to say the least, I'd still come back and visit again. The KOA in San Antonio is right up there with the finest parks we've ever visited. The attractions are many and well worth seeing (provided the sun is out), and everyone we met was friendly and helpful.

By the way, that's me in the bottom photo encouraging you to, "Keep on Traveling." Cheers!

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!