Time certainly gets away from us whether we're having fun or not. Fortunately, most everything is fun as long as we wake up in the morning outside any major hospital, har.
My major interest in blogging is in regaling the masses about the wonderful-ness of people-powered travel, especially of the biking and triking variety.
Since the first part of September we've been too busy to find time to ride such fun people-powered devices, but we have been having a bit of fun anyway, what with our several misadventures running around chasing children and grandkids in our Bounder RV.
SO. As we recently returned from a couple of overnights in Colorado and Utah, we were cruising southbound on Highway 550 (previously known as the notorious NM Route 44 between Bernalillo and Bloomfield NM) we started to get nervous, since it was starting to get dark. In years past, before my cataract surgeries in both eyes and before I started turning into a worry-wart, driving all hours of the night was no big chore for me. Even though I've had several close calls over my lifetime of driving at night, it didn't bother me that much. Nowadays, I don't mind short bits of driving after dark, but Jacque HATES it and gets downright negative if we continue driving after dark. She prefers finding a place to park, getting set up, and putting on the meal preparations...... well BEFORE dark. I'm still suffering from "Get as many miles as you can before stopping" syndrome.
This trip, as we climbed the hill southbound out of Bloomfield NM, the sun started setting. We had thought (earlier in the day) that we could make it easily from Moab, UT, to home in one stretch of driving, as we have done many times in the past. This time, however, we didn't START the trip until 11 AM or so which kinda klonked the concept of making the run entirely in daylight.
We had gone only a few miles as the sky darkened when a fast moving car approached from the rear and I noticed if he passed us he would run over a couple of shredded truck tires lying in the middle of the 4-lane road. He roared past without a care, and did not seem to suffer any damage from the tire carcasses he ran over, but it worried me that he might have side-swiped us trying to miss the junk. THEN I began to worry about what might happen if we encountered such junk in OUR lane. Yes, the headlights worked and I could see maybe 100 yards ahead..... BUT the RV, especially when towing the Toad (RV talk for a towed vehicle, in our case a not-very-light Ford Exploder), is extremely hard to stop and takes a long while, standing on the brakes, to come to a complete stop. So, in fact, I was running faster than our brakes could save us if something appeared dead ahead in the headlights. Had there been anywhere to park, I would have given up and pulled over and waited for daylight to resume travel, even though we'd hoped to get home in time to attend our home Church ward on Sunday morning. We passed the Jicarilla Apache Casino out in the middle of nowhere; where the old temporary casino lies vacant with a large parking lot. We stayed there one night a year or so ago on another trip and the noise from trucks coming and going from the station and casino made it hard to sleep. Thus we continued on, finally arriving in the darkened village limits of Cuba, New Mexico. We saw no signs for RV parks so I turned on the mobile internet and we Googled to see if any were listed for this non-bustling metropolis. We laughed out loud when the listing "Theresa's RV Park and Beauty Salon" appeared. We called the number to find how far it was and we had passed it without noticing any signs of an RV park. "Theresa" very politely explained she had a vacancy and that she would "Turn the Light On" for their sign so we could find them. We carefully turned the monster RV around and went back, spotting her now-illuminated sign on the west side of the highway. It was still very dark and we could see no entrance but turned in anyway, realizing at the last moment that there WAS no paved entrance, and the narrow dirt entrance was rugged and full of pot-holes..... we were desperate enough to carefully crawl the rest of the way behind the "Beauty Parlor" (a room in the proprietress's double-wide mobile home) to find our spot. The nice little old lady vaguely pointed where we could park, commenting ".... I'm not sure..... I think that's a good place..... I hope the electric works here for you..."
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| Daylight Shot of Theresa's Sign |
The "park" hookups seem to have been installed by an unemployed brother-in-law or something, as the sewer hookups were an odd collection of "Y's", allowing 2 campers to drain into the same pipe. Fun.
Being so close to NM 550, we worried about "big rig" and other road noise, but it was not that bad, and we slept fairly well.
