Week 3 – New Mexico & Texas

Week 3 – New Mexico & Texas

A Visit to Show Low and the Only Trees in Arizona

Like so many places we visited, we were only able to get a sip of what the Grand Canyon had to offer.
I guess we’ll just have to keep coming back. Next up, we took a 7 hour drive to Show Low, Arizona. It was a fun drive. Most of Arizona is a fairly high scrub desert… for a while we would see nothing but bushes no more than a foot or two tall, then it would gradually get into an area with larger bushes, and eventually trees. The area around Show Low is beautiful, with lots of trees. We stayed at a state park on a nice lake called Fool’s Hollow. At the bottom of the lake is what’s left of the town that a man tried to start by bringing agriculture to Arizona. It didn’t go well.

On the way, we stopped by meteor crater, the largest/best preserved intact impact crater from a meteor in the world. It was pretty awesome. At over 6k elevation, we found ourselves breathing more heavily as we climbed the stairs to the overview. They had a pretty cool little visitor center with guided tours and such. Highly recommended for people like us (basically nerds who like cosmology and geology and nerdy things).

Our camping spot in the park was lovely, 40′ from the water’s edge. I got a couple of paddles in on the lake, got to see some egrets and various waterfowl. The mallards were beautiful. It was far too windy our first full day to paddle, and I learned at Lake Isabella not to try to paddle into a hard wind. The rest of the week was low winds luckily. We had some fantastic mexican food in town at Sal & Teresa’s, and even brought some chips & salsa home.

The $975 Oil Change

One of our matras for the trip is ‘RV Life’. Unavoidably, if you’re out on the road long enough, something annoying or inconvenient will happen – and we’ll shrug, saying ‘RV life!’.

Shit’s gonna happen when you’re on the road, so just roll with it and figure it out. A good example was when it was time to take our 2012 Ford f-250 turbo diesel in to the Jiffy Lube in Show Low for an oil change. I’m used to the upsells that always come with the basic service, and usually decline. I’ll change my own air fliter and not pay you $20 for the service… I’m no backyard mechanic but I know a little – mostly stuff I learned from guys in my 4-wheeling club.

I let them change a couple of parking light bulbs, and rotate the tires. That along with the synthetic oil change brought it to like $240… The truck takes 13 quarts of oil! crazy. Although if it ever got a leak, it could lose a quart without causing too much trouble. When they were rotating the tires, the guy noticed that the shocks were all blown.

Basically, they’d bee used past their lifetime and a seal blew, leaking fluid down the shock body and covering it with road grease. Ususally shocks are nice & pretty, I’ve never seen one covered in gunk like this. So, a couple more hours and a bunch more dollars, and we got some nice new shocks. It does seem to ride better at least.

The Bugpocalypse

Our second night at Fool’s Hollow we were still right by the lake, and we
uunthinkingly turned on the light to let the dogs out. When we came back, we were faced with a classic dilemma – stay outside or open the door and let in lots of bugs. We tried to get in quickly, but there were still tons of mosquitoes and gnats flying around inside. We tried a bright idea of turning one ceiling fan to suck and the other to blow, try to create a wind tunnel… however it backfired, and the sucking fan just sucked in gnats that were smaller than the screen. Soon we were inundated with bugs!

The only thing we could think to do was to go to Walmart at 9pm to get a small vacuum & suck em out. An hour later we returned, fit to take back our kingdom! After 30 seconds the battery cut out, and it only needed 8 hours to charge! K… so we left the light on in the bathroom, which is on the other side from the bed, and went to sleep. Most of the bugs were dead by morning, so escaped with a valuable lesson… Leave the light off when they’res bugs about! Also, Oregon is awesome because it has almost no flying bugs.

Magdelena, New Mexico

Sad to leave the Fool’s Hollow State Park, we headed off to Magdelena. This is at tiny town at 6300′ elevation. It’s close to the Very Large Array, a bunch of huge satellite dishes listening to space for signals. We planned to check it out in more detail and see the local mine & ghost town. One the way there, we ate at a Smokey the Bear themed restaurant, with a quesedilla so good Robin swore to only eat Mexican food in the south. After we left, we were held up for an hour because of a 1-car accident. A boulder the size of a large bean bag just decided to roll down the hill and take out a small sedan, leaving it flipped and totaled. The driver was fine, somehow.

Our stay was cut short – Robin woke up with vertigo and I suspected the elevation, we had been over 6000′ for almost 10 days. So we drove on the Texas, and out of the high plateau – we lost about 3500′ in elevation in one long drive. We also missed getting to see the white sands spot where the first atomic test was performed in the US – another thing to come back for!

Post, Texas – Cows and Flat Plains

Another long driving day got us most of the way to Dallas, but Texas is too damn big! We waved goodbye to the beautiful mountains in the distance headed into the flat plains of North Texas. I figured it would be warm, but it was actually below freezing at night and pretty windy. We saw our first oil derricks and continued to pass herds of cows that were a regular feature on the highways ever since California. It was quite pretty driving on the planes at night, not having to turn for a hundred miles at a time.

Next stop – Dalls, Texas!