Thursday, February 19. 2009
Fuel prices are down, the weather is cold, so let’s hit the road!
We also have a couple of other good excuses for heading West – we needed to get some routine maintenance done on the coach and get an upgrade to our fuel filler necks (it’s a long story.) We also planned on visiting with some friends in the Yuma, Arizona area. We left our little ranch February 25th after doing our usual routine of sleeping and eating in it for a couple of days while parked at our place (we always discover something we forgot.) It is a wonderful feeling to head out for the freedom of the road with the excitement of seeing old friends, making new ones and discovering more of our beautiful country. We never forget how blessed we are to have the freedom to travel at our whim and set our pace.
Our typical first stop when we head West is the relatively little Balmorhea State Park – it is a gem set North of the Davis Mountains and very handy to Interstate 10. Typical of many non-commercial campgrounds, the prices are low and the camping spaces are usually two or three times larger than commercial parks. We were thinking about heading South to spend a few days at the Davis Mountains State Park, but the weather wasn’t good (we had fog and freezing weather an entire day while we were at Balmorhea) and we did not want to take a chance on driving on ice-slick roads in the Davis Mountains. So after a relaxing few days at Balmorhea, we headed to Las Cruces which is another favorite stop of ours since we get to visit with our very good friends, the Topleys.
After a fun few days of visiting (and getting to watch the Super Bowl with them), we continued to work our way West again with our usual stop in Tucson. After Tucson, we headed to the Freightliner dealer in Phoenix where we had an appointment for routine maintenance and the filler neck thing previously mentioned.
Camping at the Freightliner dealer is interesting. The operation for trucks goes on 24 hours a day, every day of the year, so at any time of the day or night we might hear a truck tractor running around the property (plus the noise from nearby Interstate 10.) Unfortunately, the RV operation only works Monday through Friday which turned out to be a problem. As usual, John monitors the work progress on the coach and things seemed to going reasonably well even though one of the new filler necks didn’t fit as designed and the tech had to make a modification for it to work. Here is a long dissertation on the project.)
It is now Friday afternoon and all of the work is completed after a full two days of work. We decide it is too late to leave, so we’ll spend another night and leave Saturday morning. We are excited that our ordeal is finally over and start to get the coach ready for the night – the leveling jacks go down and the slides go out. While John was extending the left living room slide, there was a loud bang and Jane shouted for John to stop. We were completely amazed to find the tech had fastened some parts together that had to separate when the slide was moved, so we now had a ‘custom’ modification thanks to an error. Remember when we mentioned the RV operation only worked Monday through Friday? It is now Friday afternoon and the RV techs have left for the weekend.
John immediately showed the damage to the service manager and he said we will have to wait until Monday to get the damage repaired. We’re not thrilled about spending the weekend in the parking lot, but the bigger issue was we couldn’t extend our large living room slide which about doubles our living space. It was an interesting weekend living in our newly diminutive living quarters. Monday came and the tech was extremely sorry for the situation and had the damage mostly repaired by late morning (repaired good enough for us to leave.) John will spend more time making it like new when we return home.
Off we go headed for Gila Bend, Arizona – this is only about a 90 minute drive from Phoenix and we like the campground a picture of us here. This time, the weather was a lot more tolerable than last June (it was 110-112 degrees!) Unfortunately we found out we couldn’t meet with our friends in Yuma, so we planned on exploring the Southern part of Arizona. We drove through Ajo and then stopped outside Why (great name for a town) at a little RV park (picture) behind a little casino/grocery store/gas station.
We’re now on Indian land and I think every Indian reservation we have driven through sports at least one casino and even this remote and scarcely inhabited reservation is no exception. The little casino had 2 cent slot machines, but the minimum bet was 40 cents – the Indians are apparently shrewd operators. After losing $12 in the 2 cent slot machines, we decided the payouts were way too stingy for us to have an hour’s fun (we typically leave casinos after losing $20 or winning $50 – we’re not big gamblers.) This is an interesting area – at night we heard the coyotes howling and yipping and the wild burros braying. There is no livestock fencing in this area, so the animals come and go. Something else that comes and goes are illegal aliens from Mexico – either drug runners or Mexicans trying to find their way to Phoenix to find work. We are only about 30 miles from the border and there is plenty of work for our ever-present Border Patrol. We have been through more Border Patrol checkpoints in this area than we ever had in our other trips out West. We love to see the agents working to keep illegals out – John usually tells them “good hunting” after answering their routine questions (typically, “Are you both US citizens, are there any other people on board, …and have a nice day..’)
We toured the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument which consists of thousands of acres of the Sonoran desert featuring the rare (in the U.S. at least) organ pipe cactus. For more information and pictures, here is the link to our gallery.
After a couple of nights at the Indian campground, we head East (slowly working our way back home) to a very small town John found on the Internet called Arivaca that has a well-preserved mining ghost town about 12 miles away in Ruby, Arizona. The roads are fairly narrow and the start and end of that leg had
many twists and turns. Poor Bosun the cat is getting fairly old (16 years old) and now frequently gets sick and usually leaves his breakfast somewhere interesting when we are on these kinds of roads – today was no exception unfortunately. We are all glad when we finally arrive at our campground picture. We drove out to explore the old Montana mine at Ruby and we were glad for the Jeep – lots of the roads were gravel and pretty rough. When we found out the admission charge was $12 per person and we had to sign a liability waiver, we declined when the caretaker said we could drive around in our car for free. Free is always good. Here is a picture album of the old mine settlement.
After a couple of more days we head further East and as John writes this, are in the wilderness of Southwest New Mexico near Rodeo, NM picture. We are surrounded by a ring of beautiful mountains with us about in the center and the mountains maybe 20 miles away. This area is lonely, rugged and beautiful.
We will be back in Las Cruces for the weekend for more visiting with our good friends, then probably back to Balmorhea and the Davis Mountains and then on to the little ranch. (We heard from our neighbor that some of the sheep have lambed, so we’re anxious to see the babies.)
Until the next time, thanks for riding along with us and may God richly bless you as He has us.