1-4-06
Paul here checking in from Tucson, Arizona
We rolled out of Memphis on Monday 12-26 spending very little time in downtown Memphis. We did stop by the National Civil Rights Museum http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org at the site where MLK was shot in 1968. We spent some time outside, and it’s pretty wild to stand staring at the hotel balcony that one has seen repeatedly in pictures.
However, the museum admission was a little steep for a family of four, and our dear children had seen so much of the civil rights sites by then, that we ate lunch in the camper and rolled on. Before pulling out, I did chat up the woman who was protesting outside the museum as she has done for the past 14 years. It turns out she was the last resident of the Lorraine Motel and as I understand it, she is miffed that the area was gentrified and turned into a museum instead of a community social service center. Check out her views at http://www.fulfillthedream.net
From Memphis we headed west toward Little Rock. We picked a mellow road that ran parallel to the interstate and Ruth took the wheel for the first time in the journey. Wow! Did I get a new appreciation for what Ruth had been going through riding in the back of our sardine can! The mellow side road turned out to be one of those crack-sealed nightmares with zebra stripes of asphalt everywhere. The bumping and swaying--and not to mention the noise--riding back behind the rear axle of the camper is gnarly, and Ruth’s ability to survive back there is impressive. The experience of riding back there definitely made me more sensitive to bumps and sways when I got behind the wheel again after just a couple of hours.
Arriving in Little Rock, we did manage a brief stop outside the President Clinton Library which looked pretty impressive, and a drive by Little Rock’s Central High School where the Little Rock Nine integrated the school in 1957 (http://www.centralhigh57.org and http://www.nps.gov/chsc) The high school is still in use and it is HUGE! It was the largest high school in the United States when it was built in 1927. (Miles suggested each student should get a Segway Human Transporter. Never seen a Segway? Check out http://www.segway.com/segway/ Miles and I got to try one out at the RV dealer in Vermont.)
We then found our way to an old Peace Corps friend’s house in Little Rock. Susan and her partner Barry have a great house in the woods and our avid birders. We even got a tour of Susan’s meal worm operation where she cultivates meal worms to feed her feathered friends.
Tuesday 12-27 we headed to Texarkana, Texas. It was windy and rocky in the camper, and as would prove to be the pace in the future, we covered just 140 miles in 4 hours. We settled in an Army Corps of Engineers campground at Wright Patman Lake south of
Texarkana. It was a huge, beautiful lake, and we ended up driving back and forth across the dam oohing and ahhing at the sunset as we tried to find the campground. After dark, I heard something moving around in the leaves near our campsite and we ended ups seeing our first ever armadillo. Very cute.
Wednesday 12-28 we motored on to Mineral Wells, Texas west of Ft. Worth. Ruth met a cool bilingual 2nd grade teacher from Austin in the Ladies room who stroked our egos when she heard what we were doing. Other campground notes: We saw our first raccoon (eating garbage in the dumpster) and we saw a roadrunner as we were pulling out.
West out of Mineral Wells we stuck to US 180 which turned out to be a great road for the next several days. We saw about 1 car every 10 minutes, and other than sun baked—but crack-less—asphalt it was a straight and easy trip. We were driving through big time cotton country and had never seen anything like it. We considered stopping and touching the cotton, but remembered a Vermont coworker’s recent experience with a cotton field. She and her kids stopped to touch cotton in a field down south and ended up with severe rashes. No cause and effect determined, but why take chances.
A noteworthy item on 180 is the frequent “Picnic Areas”. These are wide spots on the road in the middle of nowhere with a picnic table and a piece of galvanized tin on some posts. I can’t imagine any local “picnicking” at them unless their satellite dish broke and they got really bored at home. And, each picnic area was Handicapped Accessible, which was a bit redundant since there was no obstacle within about 10 miles of each picnic table.
We ended up in Lamesa, Texas, and based on some advice at the gas station, we settled in at the town park for the evening. Lamesa provides free RV spots at the park, and by morning, there was another camper there as well. Of some significance: Since the park had no bathroom, we officially started using our toilet. We filled and flushed with the handheld shower and all went well. I took a shower in the tiny camper bathroom, but since our hot water heater had pooped out back in Tupelo, and there was barely room for the coffee pot of hot water, no one else was interested in following my lead.
On to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next day plugging along 180. We ended up at Carlsbad RV Park http://www.carlsbadrvpark.com where, despite being in the high desert with gravel all around, the owners had pulled out the stops to make the place as nice as possible: super clean bathrooms, heated indoor pool, and marshmallows around the communal campfire on a Friday night. I ended up crashing early (I really am an introvert) but Ruth ended up chatting up some liberals around the campfire while the kids played with other kids in the rec room. Ruth’s experience at the campfire was a reminder that we’ve met all kinds of folks at RV parks and that any assumptions or stereotypes about who may be driving down the road in a “rig” are likely to be inaccurate.
One neighbor in the park was a young family (our age, are we still “young”?). Mom was with the Foreign Service and Dad was the homeschool stay-at-home dad. They had been in Austria, but were now in Albuquerque. What did they do when they came home from Austria? Fulfilled a long term dream and bought a 34’ Airstream trailer. (It was a nice trailer!) And just to put RV park diversity in perspective, as we visited with them in their Airstream in the morning, Mom pulled out a bottle of Seventh Generation spray cleaner from under the kitchen sink. (If you don’t understand, Seventh Generation makes environmentally friendly products http://www.seventhgeneration.com that may be more frequently associated with tree hugging liberals than Airstream owners.)
One more RV park thought, from the perspective of being on the road for over a month, we’d prefer to stay in a decent RV park than a state park campground. For around $20, the RV park provides great value, interesting neighbors, and decent amenities. Most have Wi-Fi and cable TV at each hook up (although we have no need for either service) and it’s not hard to find a heated pool as well.
And, Carsbad RV Park came with a very friendly young cat who felt quite at home in our camper.
December 31. We spent the day underground at Carlsbad Caverns.
Lots of Wow! (Or as Jill quotes her little friend, “That’s just whoa!”) We could have headed west from the caverns, but decided to backtrack 30 miles to the RV park in Carlsbad for New Years Eve. While Jill and Ruth swam, Miles and I headed off for supplies.
Once upon a time, my mother wrote from Cheyenne to Ruth and me in Guinea Bissau, “There is a beautiful Harvest Moon over K-mart.” Well, in Carlsbad, New Mexico on New Years Eve, there was a beautiful sunset over Wal-Mart! It was amazing.
For New Years Eve, we watched the movie “Dodgeball” in the community room and had full, brainless, belly laughs all around. Others made it through to midnight festivities, but we bailed out around 10:00.
The wind started blowing hard while we were watching the movie, and it turns out the beautiful sunset was probably a result of howling winds to the west blowing all kinds of things up into the atmosphere.
New Years Day was spent in an epic journey west from Carlsbad in howling head and cross winds. Around the Guadalupe Mountains, we were down to 20 mph and hanging on hard. It wasn’t all that different than sailing in big gusts on Lake Champlain, and there was the accompanying mix of awe, excitement, and concern.
Somewhere in cotton country in Texas our electronic overdrive went out on our automatic transmission. We could hear something buzzing and shorting out and I dismantled the dashboard trying to locate the problem. However, getting rid of the overdrive increased our gas mileage significantly, even in the roiling winds. Eventually, when we rolled into Tucson a few days later, we were up to almost 16 mph. Even if the overdrive heals itself (which it appears to be doing) I’ll probably skip it. It’s pretty amazing the little 4-cylinder gets our crazy rig down the road at all.
Geography lesson for the kids (and us), we drove across Texas, into New Mexico, and back into Texas, before hitting New Mexico again. Look at a map. Texas is big!
We did manage to make it to Deming, New Mexico on New Years Day, and like many others pulling into the RV park, we were fried from battling the wind. How did we know we were in snowbird country? Well, there was a sign at the Men’s Room sink that I thought said “Please do not use Hair Dryers in the restroom.” Nope. It said “Please do not use Hair Dye in the restroom.” Shucks, and just when gray hairs are popping up all over my head.
And further evidence of RV park diversity, despite the signs warning the old timers in the bathroom, we met a nice mom and grown daughter from Michigan. Mom had homeschooled each of her 5 kids at some point or another, and the daughter, who was in her 20’s, had just quit her job before heading off to an Americorps*VISTA position in Helena, Montana. Mom teaches World Literature via the internet and mom and daughter were walking around the park with their laptop open trying to get the best cell signal. The maintenance guy who came by in a golf cart tipped them off that Space 38 got the best reception.
We arrived in Tucson on Monday January 2nd and have been taking care of all sorts of necessary tasks at the Muscat’s (Ruth’s cousin) house. Good email, laundry, and room to sort. Suburban Tucson is very different than Vermont, especially in January. As I type, the swimming pool maintenance guy is outside skimming the pool, and the little glue traps that are all over inside the house aren’t for mice or moles like they would be at home. They’re for scorpions!
It proved harder than expected to find a place to store the RV in Phoenix. I thought there would be plenty of options since the snowbirds were all in town using their rigs. I was way off. The snowbirds drive their own rigs down, and the storage lots are full of local rigs that aren’t allowed to be parked in covenant controlled subdivisions.
Off to Phoenix tomorrow and on to Mexico early Friday morning!
Paul here checking in from Tucson, Arizona
We rolled out of Memphis on Monday 12-26 spending very little time in downtown Memphis. We did stop by the National Civil Rights Museum http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org at the site where MLK was shot in 1968. We spent some time outside, and it’s pretty wild to stand staring at the hotel balcony that one has seen repeatedly in pictures.
However, the museum admission was a little steep for a family of four, and our dear children had seen so much of the civil rights sites by then, that we ate lunch in the camper and rolled on. Before pulling out, I did chat up the woman who was protesting outside the museum as she has done for the past 14 years. It turns out she was the last resident of the Lorraine Motel and as I understand it, she is miffed that the area was gentrified and turned into a museum instead of a community social service center. Check out her views at http://www.fulfillthedream.net
From Memphis we headed west toward Little Rock. We picked a mellow road that ran parallel to the interstate and Ruth took the wheel for the first time in the journey. Wow! Did I get a new appreciation for what Ruth had been going through riding in the back of our sardine can! The mellow side road turned out to be one of those crack-sealed nightmares with zebra stripes of asphalt everywhere. The bumping and swaying--and not to mention the noise--riding back behind the rear axle of the camper is gnarly, and Ruth’s ability to survive back there is impressive. The experience of riding back there definitely made me more sensitive to bumps and sways when I got behind the wheel again after just a couple of hours.
Arriving in Little Rock, we did manage a brief stop outside the President Clinton Library which looked pretty impressive, and a drive by Little Rock’s Central High School where the Little Rock Nine integrated the school in 1957 (http://www.centralhigh57.org and http://www.nps.gov/chsc) The high school is still in use and it is HUGE! It was the largest high school in the United States when it was built in 1927. (Miles suggested each student should get a Segway Human Transporter. Never seen a Segway? Check out http://www.segway.com/segway/ Miles and I got to try one out at the RV dealer in Vermont.)
We then found our way to an old Peace Corps friend’s house in Little Rock. Susan and her partner Barry have a great house in the woods and our avid birders. We even got a tour of Susan’s meal worm operation where she cultivates meal worms to feed her feathered friends.
Tuesday 12-27 we headed to Texarkana, Texas. It was windy and rocky in the camper, and as would prove to be the pace in the future, we covered just 140 miles in 4 hours. We settled in an Army Corps of Engineers campground at Wright Patman Lake south of
Texarkana. It was a huge, beautiful lake, and we ended up driving back and forth across the dam oohing and ahhing at the sunset as we tried to find the campground. After dark, I heard something moving around in the leaves near our campsite and we ended ups seeing our first ever armadillo. Very cute.
Wednesday 12-28 we motored on to Mineral Wells, Texas west of Ft. Worth. Ruth met a cool bilingual 2nd grade teacher from Austin in the Ladies room who stroked our egos when she heard what we were doing. Other campground notes: We saw our first raccoon (eating garbage in the dumpster) and we saw a roadrunner as we were pulling out.
West out of Mineral Wells we stuck to US 180 which turned out to be a great road for the next several days. We saw about 1 car every 10 minutes, and other than sun baked—but crack-less—asphalt it was a straight and easy trip. We were driving through big time cotton country and had never seen anything like it. We considered stopping and touching the cotton, but remembered a Vermont coworker’s recent experience with a cotton field. She and her kids stopped to touch cotton in a field down south and ended up with severe rashes. No cause and effect determined, but why take chances.
A noteworthy item on 180 is the frequent “Picnic Areas”. These are wide spots on the road in the middle of nowhere with a picnic table and a piece of galvanized tin on some posts. I can’t imagine any local “picnicking” at them unless their satellite dish broke and they got really bored at home. And, each picnic area was Handicapped Accessible, which was a bit redundant since there was no obstacle within about 10 miles of each picnic table.
We ended up in Lamesa, Texas, and based on some advice at the gas station, we settled in at the town park for the evening. Lamesa provides free RV spots at the park, and by morning, there was another camper there as well. Of some significance: Since the park had no bathroom, we officially started using our toilet. We filled and flushed with the handheld shower and all went well. I took a shower in the tiny camper bathroom, but since our hot water heater had pooped out back in Tupelo, and there was barely room for the coffee pot of hot water, no one else was interested in following my lead.
On to Carlsbad, New Mexico the next day plugging along 180. We ended up at Carlsbad RV Park http://www.carlsbadrvpark.com where, despite being in the high desert with gravel all around, the owners had pulled out the stops to make the place as nice as possible: super clean bathrooms, heated indoor pool, and marshmallows around the communal campfire on a Friday night. I ended up crashing early (I really am an introvert) but Ruth ended up chatting up some liberals around the campfire while the kids played with other kids in the rec room. Ruth’s experience at the campfire was a reminder that we’ve met all kinds of folks at RV parks and that any assumptions or stereotypes about who may be driving down the road in a “rig” are likely to be inaccurate.
One neighbor in the park was a young family (our age, are we still “young”?). Mom was with the Foreign Service and Dad was the homeschool stay-at-home dad. They had been in Austria, but were now in Albuquerque. What did they do when they came home from Austria? Fulfilled a long term dream and bought a 34’ Airstream trailer. (It was a nice trailer!) And just to put RV park diversity in perspective, as we visited with them in their Airstream in the morning, Mom pulled out a bottle of Seventh Generation spray cleaner from under the kitchen sink. (If you don’t understand, Seventh Generation makes environmentally friendly products http://www.seventhgeneration.com that may be more frequently associated with tree hugging liberals than Airstream owners.)
One more RV park thought, from the perspective of being on the road for over a month, we’d prefer to stay in a decent RV park than a state park campground. For around $20, the RV park provides great value, interesting neighbors, and decent amenities. Most have Wi-Fi and cable TV at each hook up (although we have no need for either service) and it’s not hard to find a heated pool as well.
And, Carsbad RV Park came with a very friendly young cat who felt quite at home in our camper.
December 31. We spent the day underground at Carlsbad Caverns.
Lots of Wow! (Or as Jill quotes her little friend, “That’s just whoa!”) We could have headed west from the caverns, but decided to backtrack 30 miles to the RV park in Carlsbad for New Years Eve. While Jill and Ruth swam, Miles and I headed off for supplies.
Once upon a time, my mother wrote from Cheyenne to Ruth and me in Guinea Bissau, “There is a beautiful Harvest Moon over K-mart.” Well, in Carlsbad, New Mexico on New Years Eve, there was a beautiful sunset over Wal-Mart! It was amazing.
For New Years Eve, we watched the movie “Dodgeball” in the community room and had full, brainless, belly laughs all around. Others made it through to midnight festivities, but we bailed out around 10:00.
The wind started blowing hard while we were watching the movie, and it turns out the beautiful sunset was probably a result of howling winds to the west blowing all kinds of things up into the atmosphere.
New Years Day was spent in an epic journey west from Carlsbad in howling head and cross winds. Around the Guadalupe Mountains, we were down to 20 mph and hanging on hard. It wasn’t all that different than sailing in big gusts on Lake Champlain, and there was the accompanying mix of awe, excitement, and concern.
Somewhere in cotton country in Texas our electronic overdrive went out on our automatic transmission. We could hear something buzzing and shorting out and I dismantled the dashboard trying to locate the problem. However, getting rid of the overdrive increased our gas mileage significantly, even in the roiling winds. Eventually, when we rolled into Tucson a few days later, we were up to almost 16 mph. Even if the overdrive heals itself (which it appears to be doing) I’ll probably skip it. It’s pretty amazing the little 4-cylinder gets our crazy rig down the road at all.
Geography lesson for the kids (and us), we drove across Texas, into New Mexico, and back into Texas, before hitting New Mexico again. Look at a map. Texas is big!
We did manage to make it to Deming, New Mexico on New Years Day, and like many others pulling into the RV park, we were fried from battling the wind. How did we know we were in snowbird country? Well, there was a sign at the Men’s Room sink that I thought said “Please do not use Hair Dryers in the restroom.” Nope. It said “Please do not use Hair Dye in the restroom.” Shucks, and just when gray hairs are popping up all over my head.
And further evidence of RV park diversity, despite the signs warning the old timers in the bathroom, we met a nice mom and grown daughter from Michigan. Mom had homeschooled each of her 5 kids at some point or another, and the daughter, who was in her 20’s, had just quit her job before heading off to an Americorps*VISTA position in Helena, Montana. Mom teaches World Literature via the internet and mom and daughter were walking around the park with their laptop open trying to get the best cell signal. The maintenance guy who came by in a golf cart tipped them off that Space 38 got the best reception.
We arrived in Tucson on Monday January 2nd and have been taking care of all sorts of necessary tasks at the Muscat’s (Ruth’s cousin) house. Good email, laundry, and room to sort. Suburban Tucson is very different than Vermont, especially in January. As I type, the swimming pool maintenance guy is outside skimming the pool, and the little glue traps that are all over inside the house aren’t for mice or moles like they would be at home. They’re for scorpions!
It proved harder than expected to find a place to store the RV in Phoenix. I thought there would be plenty of options since the snowbirds were all in town using their rigs. I was way off. The snowbirds drive their own rigs down, and the storage lots are full of local rigs that aren’t allowed to be parked in covenant controlled subdivisions.
Off to Phoenix tomorrow and on to Mexico early Friday morning!
posted by The Lambersons at 9:32 PM
2 Comments:
Happy New Year Lambersons.
You're making us smile and keeping us warm up here in the Tundra. We are all travelling with you in spirit. The blog is great!
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