Preparing to Leave Q

We've decided to leave Quartzsite this coming Tuesday, April 1, to start our trek north (March Madness will be over by then :-) ).

In preparation, Earl has been busy cleaning the roof...the first time it's been cleaned since we owned it! He hasn't been up on the roof with a hose or a bucket of water, but instead has been using a scrub brush and 303 Aerospace Protectant to clean it (the hard way). He's done with the main part of the roof and has only the top of the slides left to do. He'll have to use a bucket of water and a long-handled brush for those since he won't be able to walk on the slides.

You're probably asking yourself why I haven't been up there helping. In short, I don't do heights! I'm somewhat acrophobic, so I don't like getting up high. The hardest part for me wouldn't be actually getting up on the roof, it would be trying to get back down again!

Quartzsite

We returned to Quartzsite around lunch time and parked on the lot next to Larry and Sharon Holman, which they own.

Earl had to go down to RV Lifestyles to pick up a new sewer hose since our old one had a pin-sized hole in it (not a good thing when you're trying to drain the black tank!).

We ended up going to Taco Mio for dinner.

Miles driven: 131.9
GPS coordinates: N 33° 39.510' / W 114° 13.628'

Gila Bend Elks Lodge

We had lunch at the Dairy Queen in Picacho...probably the last time we'll do so! While their hamburgers are good, they take FOREVER to make each order...Earl said he was watching them while he was standing there waiting for our order (I'd already returned to the truck with the drinks), and the cook worked on one order at a time, and wouldn't start the next order until s/he was done with the current one. I sat out in the truck for at least 20 minutes before I finally walked back to find out what was taking so long. It's definitely NOT "fast" food!

We're spending the night at the Elks Lodge in Gila Bend, but before parking, we filled up with diesel ($3.949).

Miles driven: 211.8
GPS coordinates: N 32° 57.150' / W 112° 41.799'

Willcox Elks Lodge

Before leaving Deming, Earl filled up the truck with diesel at the Sav O Mat gas station in town. On our previous trips to Deming, this gas station has always had the cheapest prices on fuel, and this time was no exception. Diesel at this station was $3.579 per gallon when all the other stations in town were at something like $3.709 or more.

We stopped in Lordsburg for lunch. We were going to eat the the restaurant we'd stopped at before that used to be a Denny's but had changed hands the last time we'd stopped there for lunch. Well, the restaurant is now closed, so we walked over to the Subway in the Love's Travel Plaza to have lunch.

We're parked for the night at the Elks Lodge in Willcox, and are lucky to have found a place! Of all the times we've stayed here, if we weren't the only people staying here, there were only one or two other rigs. Well, this time there's something going on and the place is packed! I'm not sure what kind of get together it is, but Earl says he's seen a few WIN (Wandering Individuals Network) stickers on some of the rigs, so perhaps that's who all these people are!

After arriving and unhooking, we drove down to the Safeway in town to do grocery shopping and stopped by the Wilcox Truck Plaza to fill up with diesel ($3.819).

Miles driven: 141.4
GPS coordinates: N 32° 15.142' / W 109° 49.633'

We had four books sitting around that both Earl and I had read, so decided to walk down to the office where they have a book exchange library to leave our books and pick up four more.

As we neared the office, we saw a red Lazy Daze sitting there...turned out to be Kate and Terry Kline who were coming in from their stay at Rock Hound State Park. As we sat in their rig talking, we compared sites at Rock Hound. It turns out that they parked in the same space we had parked in on our previous trip. When they left, friends of theirs took the spot and would leave when Kate and Terry returned to the park in a week or so. Since we knew we couldn't get our favorite spot, we decided to return to Quartzsite. OK, OK, I know it's a flimsy excuse, but it was all we needed to help us make our choice of where to go next! :-)

Dreamcatcher RV Park

We're back at Dreamcatcher RV Park, the Escapees park in Deming. After setting up, we went to the grocery store (Peppers) to buy dinner...an already-prepared whole chicken, potato salad, and a veggie. No cooking required (except for the veggies), enough for dinner tomorrow night, and less than going out to eat.

We haven't decided where we'll go from here. We may go back out to Rockhound State Park for a week, or we may head off to Arizona and Quartzsite for awhile before starting our journey north for the summer.

White Sands National Monument

I guess I'm now officially "old." :)

We drove out to White Sands National Monument and I bought an Interagency Senior Pass (this is the old "Golden Age Passport"). That, and the fact that I'll be receiving my first Social Security payment this month, puts me firmly in the "senior" category.

The sands of White Sands NM are white because they are composed of gypsum, not the usual gray-looking silica that most of us along the Pacific Coast are familiar with (sand in other areas of the world may be composed of other materials, such as volcanic rock in the Hawaiian Islands or limestone found in tropical and subtropical coastal areas).

White Sands NM is located in the Tularosa Basin which was covered by a shallow inland sea 250 million years ago. 70 million years ago, when the Rocky Mountains were being formed, the gypsum-bearing marine deposits from this inland sea were lifted up into a giant dome which began collapsing around 10 million years ago (the original sides of this dome now form the San Andres Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east).

Most of the time, gypsum eroded from mountains gets washed out to sea, but the Tularosa Basin has no outlet to the sea. Therefore, all the water flowing into the basin either sinks into the ground, or gathers in shallow seasonal lakes called Playas.

Some of the animals that live in the White Sands NM, like the pocket mouse, two different kinds of lizards, and several insects, have developed a white coloration to blend in with the sands.

Alamogordo Elks Lodge

We left Bottomless Lakes State Park this morning and drove to the Elks Lodge in Alamogordo. This Elks Club has full hookup spaces for $10 per night.

Miles driven: 139.7
GPS coordinates: N 32° 51.8088' / W 105° 57.8004'

Well, another month has passed...

And I haven't made any posts to this blog. Time to catch up, again.

We left Lone Star Corral, the Escapees park in Hondo, Texas, on Saturday, February 2, and drove the nearly 85 miles to Lady Bird Johnson Municipal Park just south of Fredericksburg. That night we had dinner at Denny's.

The following Monday, we visited with friends, Ross and Beverly Taylor at their home in Fredericksburg, and then we all went out to dinner at Der Lindenbaum, a German restaurant. We had a very nice visit and enjoyed getting together with them again (we'd seen Ross and Beverly last in early September 2007, at Bluewater Lake State Park which is located between Grants and Gallup, New Mexico).

The last time we'd visited Fredericksburg, in April 2001, we visited the Nimitz Museum and the Wildseed Farms. Our original plan was to explore more of Fredericksburg on this trip, including the Pioneer Museum, but both Earl and I came down with another cold, and neither of us felt like running around town. After years and years of not having colds, this was the second cold we've had within the past few months (the first being after our trip to Idaho in November).

We left Fredericksburg on Wednesday, February 6, and drove 196 miles to our home Coast to Coast park, Lake Whitney RV Resort, north of Whitney, Texas. I broke down and saw a doctor the next day, since my cold had settled into my chest. He prescribed a bunch of pills, and while they helped, after all the pills were taken, I still wasn't completely over the cold (or whatever the heck it was). Thanks goodness for Mucinex! Here it is almost a month later, and I'm probably about 98%-99% over being sick. We did get a chance, though, to eat at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants in town...Tres Hermanos.

We spent 17 days at Lake Whitney RV Resort, then headed back to New Mexico. We're currently at Bottomless Lakes State Park southeast of Roswell, New Mexico. While the lakes in this park aren't really bottomless (they range in depth from 17' to 90'), the greenish-blue color makes them look like they are bottomless. This park was New Mexico's first state park, established in 1933.

We drove into Roswell to do some grocery shopping and ended up joining Sam's Club again. At one time, we had belonged to both Sam's Club and Costco, but cancelled our Sam's Club membership when we didn't use it that much. However, the only Costco in New Mexico is in Albuquerque, where we're not going to be anytime soon. In fact, we probably won't be near a Costco for a while now, so we rejoined Sam's Club.

We got several inches of snow last night! Unfortunately, I waited too long to go out, so don't have any pictures.


PICTURES:


Top left: This picture of "Norma Jean's Diner" was in the Denny's where we had dinner on our first night in Fredericksburg. Since my mother's name is Norma Jean, I just had to take a picture of the picture!


Top right: Maxx loves to lay in the sun! Sometimes it's too cold for him to lay on his pad outside, so he'll find any little bit of sun inside in which to lay.


Bottom: This is one of the lakes at Bottomless Lakes State Park...the one nearest the RV campground.