On the Way to Portland, Oregon by way of South Dakota

FIRST LEG:  KARTCHNER TO NEW MEXICO

LAST DAYS AT KARTCHNER

Everything worked out for us and this year instead of heading through California and taking our usual route to the Portland, Oregon area, we are taking a thousand-mile detour to South Dakota first.  We got our COVID vaccines, finished our doctor and dentist appointments and then decided that it is time for some enjoyable travel.

Last year on our trip from Arizona to Portland we hardly left the RV.  Just pulled into sites and holed up until we got on the road again.  The joy of traveling in an RV is that you sleep in your own bed, use your own linens, brush your teeth in your own sink, and use your own shower and toilet.  And we cook our own food which we eat at our own table.  When we pull into a rest stop, we turn off the engine and stay in air conditioned or heated comfort.  It is the perfect way to travel during a global pandemic.  Except that pulling into new campgrounds, seeing people ignoring masking mandates and social distancing is unpleasant and scary.  So, last year we would just un-hitch and go right back into our sanctuary.

The safety and convenience of RV travel has become way too popular.  It gets harder and more expensive to find campground sites.  Even in the best of places, seeing unmasked folks coming out of campground laundries kept me washing clothes by hand this entire last year.  Finding ways to dry them without being able to hang clothes outside was a bit of a struggle but better than rubbing elbows in a hot humid crowded laundry room with unmasked people.

Last year’s trip to Portland and the return trip back through the same campgrounds was not fun.  This winter at Kartchner Caverns was great but we look forward to a little extra scenery for our summer season.  We began planning early and decided to take care of some business in our home state of South Dakota.  That made it easy to plan our trek through New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska – then the Black Hills of South Dakota – swinging west to Wyoming, Montana, and Washington and finally to the Portland area.

We did have some concerns for a short time at our jobs in the Caves.  The AZ Governor eliminated the mask mandate, and the director of AZ Parks issued a directive that we could not require masks in the Caves.  It was obvious that neither of those two understood the atmosphere in the Cave.  And we became very worried about entering the Cave with strangers who would possibly be unmasked.  The Cave has a great oxygen level due to its size of about 2.5 miles.  But that air comes in through a grapefruit-size hole.  The air exchanges about once every 3 to 5 days or something like that.  That means the air in the Cave is still – no breeze – and aerosols just hang in that humid environment for hours.  Understanding this made us, and other volunteers, reconsider what we had thought was sufficient safety conditions.  We stopped going into the Cave for a while.  We did other jobs that didn’t expose ourselves so much until we were two weeks passed our second vaccine.  We also observed that most people took the staff’s recommendation to wear a mask and only a few people went through the Cave without one.  Once we felt better about our safety, we resumed our usual tasks.

By then other volunteers had left for the season so we picked up lots of extra hours.  Our lives got busy, but we love our jobs, so it was fun.  I am now a Lead Guide for both the Rotunda/Throne Room tour and the Big Room tour.  Doug loves driving the tram and we both enjoy trailing other tours.  We continued our extra duty of Opening the Cave a day or two a week and occasionally a shift at the Gatehouse. Doug and I put some Earth Day bat crafts together and although the participation was minimal, we felt good about promoting Earth-friendly crafts on Earth Day.

My work with the Adopt A Bat program has been simplified with Doug’s expertise at automating it but subscriptions still keep me checking at least twice a day.  We did a little extra social media posts for Earth Day and wound up with 54 subscriptions over a 4-day period.  I’ll maintain the program remotely over the summer and see what happens when we get back to Kartchner in the Fall.

We also continued our weekly Flamingo gatherings of volunteers and sometimes Rangers.  Those weekly get togethers cemented our friendships during this difficult year when we all needed companionship.  So, the final weeks flew by and we left on Friday, May 7^th after a wonderful last Flamingo.

LORDSBURG, LAS CRUCES – HATCH!

After working so much, we immediately felt like we are on vacation!

Doug planned two short driving days to make sure our motorhome, Meriwether, and our towed vehicle, Lewis, were on their best behavior.  We spent our first night at the Lordsburg KOA in New Mexico.  It was a quiet night with almost no one else in the campground.  Doug took care of a few things and relaxed.  I painted some rocks to leave along our trip stops.  (I never take or leave a rock at any State or National Parks or Natural Recreation sites, etc.)  It’s just fun for me to paint something pretty and put an inspirational quote on a rock.  I like to think of them as bringing a smile to someone and don’t we all need that in our lives?

The scenery into New Mexico is iconic desert.  We stopped seeing saguaros and started seeing yuccas dotting the desert landscape.  As we drove past my favorite rocky scenery in Texas Canyon in Cochise County, I vowed once again to put The Amerind Museum in Dragoon back on my list of must-dos in the Fall.

During that part of the trip – less than an hour from our starting place – I started to crave a Green Chile Cheeseburger.  My mouth knew we were on the way to Hatch, New Mexico!

We traveled along I-10 and passed a sign for the biggest Pistachio, which we had seen in Alamogordo.  The signs along the road point out that there might be “zero possibility”.  That means you might not be able to see anything due to dust storms.  We were lucky and the wind wasn’t too bad.

After a relaxing afternoon and evening, we took our time leaving Saturday morning.  Can’t get to the next campground too early!  Our second day of driving was also short.  We got into Las Cruces KOA, ate a quick lunch, unhitched our car and took an afternoon drive right to Hatch.  We didn’t want to delay getting our roasted green chiles.

The road from Las Cruces to Hatch is picturesque – lots of farms and pecan groves.  Then you see the mountains.  South of Las Cruces are the Tortugas and the Organ Mountains, which were in the distance.  We traveled through the Picacho Peak area (same name as a favorite park near Tucson).  Getting closer to Hatch we went through beautiful mountain peaks on all sides of us.

We found a place to purchase frozen roasted green chiles and bought 10 pounds of them.  I’ll pack them into portion-size bags and re-freeze them.  That should last for a while.  We also bought a new ristra – our old one from Hatch was dusty and faded.  And we got some Mexican oregano – we make sure it’s properly labeled because it really does look suspicious in its little baggie.

This time I got my Green Chile Cheeseburger at Sparky’s – supposed to be the best.  There were lines at the window and lots of folks at socially distant picnic tables in the large blocked off parking lot.  Everyone was masked and polite.  I ordered the burger with wedge fries and a side of green chile queso.

It was painful to ride home with that delicious burger and its incredible smells, but I did it.  I quickly made a vegetarian turkey-style cutlet for Doug which I covered in green chiles, of course.  I shared the potatoes and queso (perfectly hot and spicy!)  I heated up my burger and yum, yum, it was worth the wait!  I’m writing this just an hour or so later while my tummy is still smiling with satisfaction.  It was certainly worth the 35 miles each way we drove for this amazing New Mexico treat.

We once again visited the little western town of Mesilla where Billy the Kid went to jail. The town plaza seemed familiar and we quickly realized we had been there 4 years ago. We strolled around the craft market at the plaza and went in a few of the stores.

BERNALILLO

Traveling the way we do, often on two-lane highways, we get to know the land better than shooting down the bigger highways.  Neither of us is good at figuring out what is sprouting from the ground on the farmed land.  We take wild guesses – and we will never know if that stuff is kale or onions.  We do recognize pecan trees and we saw many of these well-tended orchards.  We like to play music and sometimes the perfect song comes on in the perfect place.  But on our trip from Las Cruces to Bernalillo that didn’t happen.  At one point, Elvis was singing In the Ghetto as we drove through miles of uninhabited desert.

We did get to see lots of mountains.  Some of them had the familiar limestone striations and even the balso quartzsite ridges like our Muffintop in the Whetstones.  Some of these mountains are sandstone and you can see the different erosion patterns.  Near Las Cruces, the Rio Grande was a large expanse of sand.  It is used in that area for ATV driving.  No water at all – just miles of tire tracks in the dry sand.  But then as we drove along the Sacramento Mountains, the Rio Grande became the Grand River it should be. 

We pulled into the Bernalillo KOA and stepped back in time to 1997.  We spent time here in our pop-up trailer with Amy and Julie.  It was our trip from New Jersey to the Southwest and back again.  Bernalillo was the turning point for me.  It literally was where we turned to head home, and it was where I officially fell in love with the Southwest.  My last moments in this campground on that memorable trip were spent with our video camera taking pictures of the clouds as my voice broke narrating how much I didn’t want to go home.

It has been an enduring love for me.  The Southwest holds my heart and I never tire of the brown rock-exposed mountains, the clear blue sky and the fresh hot air.  This New Jersey girl really set her roots down on this part of the continent.

The campground seems about the same, but different owners.  The sites are close, but we have a patio site.  This upgrade is simply a square of artificial grass just big enough for a small picnic table with a little room for our chairs.  We have a short pine tree which litters the ground with little round pinecones.  I think it’s a Pinon Pine.  There are lots of shedding cottonwoods here too.  The temperatures are much cooler here – mornings in the 50’s and midday in the 70’s (maybe the low 80’s).  There is a new addition to this campground. On the other side of the wall there is a ramshackle beer brewery, the Kaktus Brewery, that also serves some food.  It wasn’t open our first night, but I will keep checking.  The menu is intriguing: German pretzels; Curry Wurst, Affogato (sea salt and caramel gelato) and a selection of pizzas with some really unusual toppings.  Looking forward to tasting something different.

ALBUQUERQUE

We did make a quick trip to Old Town Albuquerque on Wednesday, May 12^th.  But the day started out at Stewart and Stevenson’s transmission repair facility.  Doug thought he found a transmission fluid leak and this place was nice enough to get us in to check it out.  We had to be there by 7:30 am.  I followed Doug in the car, got lost on the crazy interchanges in ABQ but finally got to the facility.  We were entertained by another couple who are on the road too. They told us stories of camphosting, Viking Cruises and tornadoes in Missouri. The time in the waiting room passed quickly and we weren’t there long – the news was good – no problem.  So, we hitched up, drove back to our campsite on the other side of ABQ, had a quick lunch, watched a really bad (good?) Godzilla movie and then headed to ABQ for an afternoon in Old Town.  We stopped in a few of our favorite stores, checked out a few new ones and sat on a bench.  Doug has not been feeling great – a bit of a stomach problem.  We decided it had gone on too long, so we stopped at Urgent Care.  Then to a lab for tests.  Hopefully we will get this under control.

We got home and Doug thinks there is a propane leak – not in the tank but in the hose.  We have to leave tomorrow morning – we will just not use the stove until we get that checked out.  It will be a quiet night of rest and hydration for Doug.  At least we have a microwave so we will not starve.

The Kaktus Brewery with the cool pizzas doesn’t open until Thursday so we will miss out on their gourmet pizzas.  I am consoling myself with the thought of all the calories I didn’t eat these last two days – no German pretzels, no Mexican food in ABQ, no yummy pizza.  Oh well, I’m sure we will find something fun to eat when Doug feels better!

On to Raton.  Pronounced “Rat Tone”. 

RATON

Just one night in Raton.  The ride was a little longer today – over 200 miles.  No more desert.  It was at first mountains covered in Rocky Mountain junipers and pinon pine trees with an occasional Blue Spruce in the Sante Fe Forest.  We saw the flat tops of mesas mixed with more pointy peaks.  Then we hit a very long expanse of grazing lands.  Not many cattle to be seen but miles of yellow-green flat pastures.  We stopped for a quick lunch at a rest stop.

The Raton KOA is an oldish style KOA undergoing some building construction.  The sites are much larger than the newer KOA’s where you practically touch your neighbor.  These sites are also very long.  Not much to comment on – dusty gravel but level sites with sparsely placed tiny trees.  But nice owners and a perfectly fine stop for our one night stay.  We didn’t unhitch – just hooked up electric and water and pushed the slides out.  We are set.

New Mexico proved to be the best in mask wearing.  Every store, outside and inside, even just walking through the campgrounds, people wear masks.  The signs say “by order of our governor” and it seems that New Mexicans are proud of that.  We’ll have to see what other states do.  For sure, this is a complete change from Arizona.

Next stop:  Colorado Springs.